A Defense of Bad Art: For the Love of Schlock

This is not an argument that comes easy for me, particularly given the current state of the top 25, but someone should make it.

I don’t particularly like bad art, but it deserves a place at the table. And because we live in a democratic society, particularly one struggling with this whole “sharing the table” thing, we should learn to deal with it.

In 1992 in Kassel, Germany, a curator organized Documenta, a prestigious show of about 150 invited artists. He made a point to publicly exclude Jeff Koons, the irreverent bad boy of the art world. Koons’ response to the snub was to mount “Puppy,” a 36-foot, schnauzer-like plush made of about 70,000 blooming annuals near the exclusive exhibition. "Puppy" has gone on to make numerous other appearances. The New Yorker reported that when it appeared at Rockefeller Center in 2000, a teenager declared it “dumb.” Exactly Koons’ point.

Now, like Koons, 1,700 some-odd ArtPrize artists get to flip the bird to the art establishment and cram our little city full of stuff. Art has, as John Berger has written, “existed within a certain preserve”—cathedrals, palaces, museums. Now, in Grand Rapids, it’s in the streets. The most democratic of spaces: conference rooms, offices, banks, bookstores, beauty salons, a tattoo parlor, clothing shops, churches, bridges, parking lots and a few actual exhibit spaces. In a two-week fit of horror vacui, they have all become chock full of the odd, the entertaining, the sentimental, the decorative, the bizarre and the beautiful. Bad art is a part of this democratic space; without it, it’s just another rarified art world affair preserved apart from the hoi polloi. And who needs that?

Yes, a lot of it is bad. But let there be a place for mosaic melodrama, the eerily sexualized toothpick mermaid, the steam punk pig, the wingnut who spray-painted himself and his rubber riding boots gold. Let there be a place, even, for the unwittingly creepy giant card with “Size Matters” painted on the hands of an otherwise perfectly innocent-looking young girl. And fine, let that place be a centrally located parking lot of a seven-in-one meat-market bar with bad music.

(I’m just curious: Do the curators at Schlock Central really like this stuff or do they know a good marketing gimmick when they see one? They deserve some credit: their pieces cohere better than, say, the collection at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. But what ties them together is a gee-whiz nostalgia for shag carpets, rec rooms, and that post-Nixonian casserole-era kitsch.)

Does this lower the bar? Of course it does. But we also get to say so. The best of the worst is captured in a Tumblr of hilarious crowd-sourced takes on the oddest pieces, which, in it’s own satirical way, elevates the discussion. What would ArtPrize be without the pooping fairy, the penny made out of pennies (get it?!), the crayola Sunday-school lesson? Quiet and unnoticed.

The political power of art has been demystified, stripped of any of its all-too-common pseudo-intellectual authority. Some might say eviscerated altogether, but we shouldn’t because that’s just too easy. What better way for a community to converse about what art is for, what makes it good, what makes it bad than to overwhelm us with a lot of it and then ask us to decide? These are not hallowed, hushed galleries. People are talking, children are squealing, artists are mingling. Yes, take it to the people, but let us all learn a thing or two about how to look.