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Pointless Pointillism

Brandweek, Nov 27, 2000 by Sid Ross

A meticulously drawn, pointillist rendering of an elderly man sitting on a toilet seat. An acrylic painting with some bizarre ideas about the human form, featuring a nude, rosy-cheeked young woman. A canvas of an august, blue-haired grandmother named Lucy floating among a bed of tall grass and long-stemmed white flowers.

These are just a few of the brazenly bad works of art that have found a welcoming home offline at the Museum of Bad Art, and another one online at Glyphs.com, a mini-portal of art and culture sites published by The Virtual Mirror. The site is supported by banner ads from placidly mainstream companies like Visa and Amazon, while the offline museum is located in the basement of the Dedham Community Theater in Dedham, Mass. Its tagline is "Art Too Bad To Be Ignored" and it celebrates all forms of bad art.

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"[The museum] got started because the person who is now our esteemed curator found a piece of art in the trash that was just so awful, and so wonderful, that it demanded to be hung," explains Louise Reilly Sacco, the museum's director of financial enablement.

That awful, wonderful piece is the aforementioned painting of the grandma among the flora entitled "Lucy in the Field With Flowers." It was painted in 1968 and rescued from the garbage (like most of the pieces in the Museum's collection) almost 30 years later MOBA has been going strong ever since, with a collection of more than 300 paintings and more arriving by the "truckfuls".

"To us, bad art has some of the same characteristics as good art," says Reilly Sacco. "It's sincere and it communicates something, but something's really gone wrong."

Relying only on some good word of mouth on its bad art, Reilly Sacco claims MOBA's site generates 18,000-20,000 hits each month. Which proves that when it comes to art, there's no accounting for (bad) taste.

Advertising Industry

Pointless Pointillism

Brandweek, Nov 27, 2000 by Sid Ross

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