Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Irony and aesthetics (NSFW). I am thinking about former UK politician David Miliband, who invited the media into his home and then became a laughingstock because of an ugly painting on his living-room wall, which it turned out his wife Louise had given him for his 40th birthday.
It seems so English to me to see snobbish newspaper headlines such as "David Miliband's awful painting: what it tells us".
The painting is offensive to aesthetes because it pastiches Matisse's La Danse in a watered-down, middlebrow way, because it is the handiwork of Michelle Dovey, a London yummy mummy, and also because it clearly gives the Milibands pleasure despite this.
I'm thinking about the Miliband Painting because tonight I was browsing on eBay and stumbled across the work of Darling Downs artist Lynne Pickering. I find her work hilariously bad, but also mesmerising.
Enormous Kitten Abstract
Rainy Day Abstract
Enormous Large White Cow
Massive Ned Kelly
Mother and Child in Flowers
And I feel guilty about my own aesthetic snobbery. How come Sidney Nolan's similarly crappy paintings of Ned Kelly get to be national treasures and Lynne Pickering's don't? How come Picasso and Modigliani get to draw wonky heads on people and it's called a bold signature style?
There are lots of issues about gender and professionalism circling around both Dovey and Pickering. You would never find a 'serious' artist selling their works on eBay; the gallery system gives them industry validation. Also, mastery of technique and visual language is constructed as the result of formal artistic training, despite the odd Henri Rousseau slipping into art history.
What's especially poignant about these kinds of bad artworks is how much they cling to and reference venerable (and even anachronistic) artistic traditions. Compare them to the conceptual, minimalist, installation or media art that attract esteem and serious discussion. There's something lovely and honest in Pickering's unambiguous faith in painting as an artform.
The Museum of Bad Art also treads a line between ironic and sincere appreciation: an inclination to laughter and an affection for the artist's effort. Can we hold both ideas in our heads simultaneously? The museum volunteers clearly care about preserving the evidence of artistic ambition, however hilariously failed that ambition is, and they do so in the language of art curatorship. Here is a recent acquisition, Ronan the Pug by Erin Rothgeb:
A while ago I discovered a Tumblr called Fuck Yeah Terrible Art. This plumbs the appalling art posted online, and so most of it is really inept manga, a disturbing amount is erotic fan art, and an even more disturbingly large chunk involves furries.
'Terrible' in this case is about subject matter as well as technique. Somehow, the worst part about this one is that it's not even Donatello – it's Michelangelo! And click through, if you dare, to see an anthropomorphic Nazi alsatian being sucked off, or perhaps Steve Irwin getting a 'death blow' from a stingray.
There is always something poignant about a passionate fan's struggle to accurately capture the physiognomy of his or her favourite celebrity, which leaves the casual observer able to recognise the subject and yet cackle cruelly at the poverty of the likeness.
This is meant to be Hugh Laurie in House!
This is not the original Fuck Yeah Terrible Art blog. Tumblr shut down the previous one because it provided links to the artists who unwittingly contributed their work. FYTA readers then trolled the artists, who complained to Tumblr, who shut down the blog.
So you can see that to maintain even the most appalled, ironically distanced appreciation of bad art, you need to maintain a certain respect for the artists.
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I actually love this penguin painting, by a 7-year-old, that was accidentally submitted to a Saatchi Gallery competition - and WON!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1394773/Mothers-online-mistake-sees-daughters-drawing-end-Saatchi-gallery.html
"Bad" painting is very now.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1394773/Mothers-online-mistake-sees-daughters-drawing-end-Saatchi-gallery.html
"Bad" painting is very now.
# posted by 
: Friday, June 10, 2011 1:21:00 PM
: Friday, June 10, 2011 1:21:00 PM 
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