The first thing you should know about the art showcased in the Museum of Bad Art is that it’s, well, bad. It’s difficult to call any piece of work bad because of the inherent subjectivity in commenting on art; but the pieces at MOBA feature misplaced brush strokes, creative interpretations on human proportions, and genre-pushing takes on abstraction that would make Picasso tilt his head. Don’t mistake the museum’s name or raison d’etre for mean-spiritedness, though. MOBA is here to celebrate the artist inside all of us.

The Museum of Bad Art was founded back in 1996 when art and antique dealer Bob Wilson found a painting in the trash. Instead of scrapping the artwork and selling the frame as intended, the work known as Lucy in the Field with Flowers became the start of a collection that has now grown to around 800 pieces. The Museum has three galleries: the Somerville Theater, in the offices of the Brookline Interactive Group, and at the New England Wildlife center. Surprisingly, they receive most of their submissions from the artists themselves.

LUCY IN THE FIELD WITH FLOWERS, Unknown | 30×24 inches | Rescued from trash in Boston MA by Scott Wilson (MOBA Esteemed Curator Emeritus) 1993
The motion, the chair, the sway of her breast, the subtle hues of the sky, the expression on her face; every detail cries out “masterpiece”.

Louise Reilly Sacco, one of the five original founders, holds the (exquisite) title of Permanent Acting Interim Executive Director. Her deep love for art and genuine desire to give artists a platform shines through when she speaks of MOBA’s mission. “We love and celebrate these pieces. We never insult them, we never say ‘this is terrible’. We love the work and we want to share them.”

MOBA’s good-natured ribbing is best on display in the narratives they develop for each piece. “We interpret them and try to say what we think is going on in them,” says Sacco. Take, for example, the caption for a piece titled Woman Riding Crustacean, “Possibly inspired by Debra Winger riding a mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy (1980), this image of what appears to be a blow-up doll riding a giant lobster looks unfinished. It may be a study for a larger, hopefully more erotically realized, work.” MOBA obviously has some fun with the unusual piece, but it also gives it something it would never have received otherwise: a platform.

It would be easy to simply ridicule the pieces and move on, but MOBA strives hard to find the positive in everything it showcases. The staff at the museum know it is better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all. Sacco expanded on this idea, “One of the things that we’ve realized we’re doing is we’re celebrating the artist’s right to fail. You can do everything wrong, or do a piece that doesn’t accomplish what you set out to do and still have something that’s interesting, that gets people talking, and those are all great things.”

There’s a Samuel Beckett quote that goes “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” The Museum of Bad Art takes this belief to heart and knows that success or failure aren’t what matters, it’s trying.

THE HORROR, THE GLORY, Tom McKinley 1952 | 22×26 inches, acrylic on canvas | Donated by the artist
No detail, and indeed, no man is spared in this bellicose epic. Battle lines reach to the sky, where gunsmoke feeds the fury of a storm, imminent in the heavens. Alleluia!

MOBA galleries and locations here

Top image courtesy of MOBA
Woman Riding Crustacean
Anonymous
12×16 inches | oil on canvas
Found in Greenwich Village by Josh Einhorn (1980’s)
Donated by Linda L. Carrubba, May 2008

The post Because we know it’s not all good appeared first on Take Magazine.

It’s the one-year anniversary of her troupe’s run of performances, and Kaylyn Bancroft can’t remember her lines. She’s stammering and uneasy on her feet while attempting to portray Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Her fellow performers look on, unsure if they should move the scene along or wait for her to remember. It’s a moment actors and audiences fear, causing a tension that can quickly become unbearable. But instead of cringing, the audience is rapt and bursting with laughter. What causes a trained professional to not only butcher Shakespeare, but to be cheered on for doing so? In Bancroft’s case, two pints of beer, one bottle of wine, and a quarter of a bottle of whiskey seem to do the trick.

Photo by Nile Hawver | Nile Scot Shots

Shit-faced Shakespeare, performed every weekend through May at the Davis Square Theater in Somerville, Massachusetts, and at Laugh Boston through June, is a simple enough concept: What happens if you get a professional actor thoroughly drunk and let him/her wreak havoc on one of William Shakespeare’s plays? The result is ingenious. The sober actors provide a masterful balance of improv and corralling the drunk, knowing exactly when to go with the bit and when to make sure the narrative progresses. The drunk actor rotates with every performance, giving the show a nearly limitless potential for return viewings. Magnificent Bastards Productions, the company behind the endeavor, has pared down plays such as Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer’s Night Dream into hour-long renditions capable of handling a main character being incapacitated while still conveying the general plot.

The productions are a thoroughly modern take on the Bard’s work that harken back to the lively experience of attending the Globe Theatre. The audience at a Shit-faced Shakespeare performance has much more in common with the groundlings (the lower classes who stood on the ground in front of the stage to watch Elizabethan-era plays) than with contemporary theatergoers of Hamlet or Macbeth. Instead of politely clapping and lightly chuckling, the audience becomes part of the experience. At the beginning of the show, two members of the crowd are given the power to stop the performance at any time and force another beer on the hapless actor (who usually reacts with a mix of feigned and real Charlie Brown-style dejection). This jovial and chaotic atmosphere does something pretty remarkable: it shines a new light on a pillar of the Western canon.

Photo by Nile Hawver | Nile Scot Shots

There’s a difference between gut-reaction humor and simply knowing something is funny. It’s the difference that explains the disconnect modern audiences feel with Shakespeare. Very few people in the 21st century have a visceral, instinctive reaction to a line intended to stir 17th-century sensibilities. Cast member Mac Young, who has also performed in traditional productions of Shakespeare, notes, “I’ve seen a lot of productions where I recognize [the material] as bawdy humor, but I’m not actually laughing.” Shit-faced Shakespeare, he says, “[Gives] energy back to the humor Shakespeare has already built in to these plays.”

The genius of the show is the way it deconstructs and dismantles a cultural institution. But it’s a loving undertaking, like a carpenter taking down a house brick by brick to show the craft and care that went into building it. Shakespeare died 400 years ago this month, but the crew of Shit-faced Shakespeare ensure that his work not only survives, it thrives.

All photos from Much Ado About Nothing | All photos by Nile Hawver | Nile Scot Shots

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