Said Louise Sacco, the permanent acting interim director of the Museum of Bad Art, quoted in "Treasures from the Museum of Bad Art" (CBS).
The article is from 2015. Some readers will know why I'm thinking about it today.
Click through and scroll to see what sort of badness is museum-worthy. It must be "sincere and original, and something went wrong in a way that's interesting."
I laughed a lot looking at these pictures — hardest at "President Kennedy Eating Ice Cream":
It's obvious what went wrong there. It's the same thing that went wrong with most of the examples at the link and that, once you think about it, causes the interestingness to fade. The painter was looking at a photograph of a person frozen in action.
There's a particular way the camera captures gesture and expression: in a snap. But a painting develops over time. What is the artist observing — other than the painting itself — during this time? You could paint entirely from your mind, remembering or imagining. And you can have something you glance at now and then, without attempting to reproduce it.
But if you are going to stare intently at this thing and make it into a painting, you have a special problem. You could become analytical and translate what you see into something that comes from your brain — like Cezanne painting a bowl of fruit. But let's assume you're just devoting your time to copying what you see. If it's a real person, that person is going to live and breathe, and they're not going to be in the middle of smiling or dancing or licking ice cream!
You'll produce a portrait that might be good or bad, but we'll be able to tell that it was painted from a live model. If you paint from a photograph that's a portrait, you might get away with it. But if you paint from a photograph that captures expression and gestures and you do it with an intent simply to reproduce it, it will be bad. You are perverting your humanity with laborious copying of what only a camera can do, and we feel revulsion. We must laugh at your work product to escape despair.
ADDED: Is that Kennedy photograph the reason for all of Biden's posing with ice cream cones?
I'll have a double scoop of the plagiarism swirl.
ALSO: Here's a Reddit thread from a couple years ago that displays and discusses the photograph of JFK. The photo is from August 1963. Somebody says "Probably the last ice cream he ever ate" and somebody else says "Brain freeze."
UPDATE: I wrote: "Some readers will know why I'm thinking about it today." I didn't want to reveal an answer from the NYT crossword. One clue was "The 'BA' of the Boston museum MOBA." Answer: "bad art."
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