New MOBA publication a triumph

Other than Pazzo Books (newly relocated from Roslindale Square to Centre Street in West Roxbury) The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), located in a secure bunker deep beneath the Dedham Community Theatre, is perhaps the only hip, edgy cultural venue anywhere west of JP's Milky Way.

My sons and I have visited MOBA dozens of times. It's hard not to visit it, actually, since you are required to walk through it on the way to the Dedham Community Theatre's men's room. But even if nature weren't calling, we drop by MOBA every time we're in the neighborhood, because the museum is just that, well, good.

MOBA celebrates and analyzes Bad Art, which curator Michael Frank, a musician and entertainer who also heads up the Regan Youth Baseball League in Jamaica Plain, defines as an artwork that was "created by someone who was seriously attempting to make an artistic statement -- one that has gone horribly awry in either its concept or execution." There is no room in MOBA for the work of young children, then. Nor is there room for paintings on black velvet and other commercially produced works, paint-by-numbers works, or paintings cranked out for tourists. No matter how bad or good this sort of thing may be, it wasn't intended to make an artistic statement.

This painting, however, was:

A perfectly good word for the paintings on display at MOBA is "kitsch," which I once defined as "cultural products intended to be high quality, but seriously flawed in conception or taste." But wait -- in the 1990s, we were told constantly that we should laugh at kitsch. Does MOBA intend for museum visitors to laugh at its collection? Yes and no.

There are four possible reactions to MOBA's collection:

1) You're too highbrow to dig these paintings. You think they stink, and you can't understand why anyone would bother hanging them on a gallery wall. Stop reading this now, highbrow hipster. You're beyond help.

2) A straightforward but lowbrow appreciation of the artworks. Perhaps you think MOBA's watercolor painting of a queen holding what appears to be a chocolate chip cookie (but was probably intended to be some royal sigil) is pretty good. You're wrong -- it's not a good painting. But at least you haven't lost the capacity to feel, so bravo.

3) You sarcastically pretend to enjoy the paintings, because you're an anti-hip hipster. Sigh. People who pretend to enjoy kitsch as part of some lame 'anti-hip' put-on are to be pitied and even despised. I once claimed: "Their apparent hipness is nothing but the despair and rage of the emotionally disabled masquerading as coolness." You're a middlebrow, sir, and I invite you to stop reading now.

4) You feel an emotional connection with the paintings while simultaneously recognizing that it's not "good" art. Congratulations! You are an ironist in the best possible sense of the term. You're able to love something and enjoy its flaws -- laugh at them, even -- at the same time. Susan Sontag calls this "camp":

Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as 'a camp,' they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

NB: When the cast of John Waters' 1998 movie "Pecker" toast the "death of irony," at the end of that movie, they're toasting the death of anti-hip hipsterism, not camp. Sontag swiped the term "camp" from gay men, who later demanded that she give it back. The term "high-lowbrow," or "hi-lobrow," both of which I coined, are preferred.

I, for one, feel tenderly about MOBA. Which is why I'm excited to report the publication of "The Museum of Bad Art: Masterworks" (Ten Speed Press).

Edited by Michael Frank and Louise Reilly Sacco (the museum's "permanent acting interim executive director"), the gorgeously produced book lovingly reproduces 70 works of bad art from the collection, along with Frank's perceptive and wittily understated reviews.

For example. Regarding "Gilded Nude" (Above), an anonymous oil-on-canvas painting, Frank writes: "The viewer is struck immediately by the youthful female subject's oversized arm." Isn't that great? If he'd written "oversized... arm," or "oversized, um, arm," we'd be in the purgatory of hipsterism or anti-hip hipsterism. But he didn't! He wouldn't.

What does Frank have to say about "Ronan the Pug," which is not only slapdash but odd, since the dog seems to be looking up soulfully at the ceiling and crooning?

"The artist's affection for her dog far outstrips her artistic skill," he notes gently. "Paint is slapped on the canvas with random brushstrokes, creating matted, impossible fur. Done in such a hurry that the canine anatomy was not even considered, the artist still captures Ronan's playful sweetness. Or perhaps the pup has just lapped up all the spilled eggnog at a holiday party and is ready to attempt a clear tenor rendition of 'Danny Boy.'"

Perfect.

I urge Brainiac readers to visit MOBA. (A larger version of the museum recently opened in the basement of the Somerville Theatre. If you're trapped on the wrong side of the Charles, check it out!) And support it, too, by buying this book.