Over the weekend I went to the bad art expo. Yes you heard that right, a show in the convention hall dedicated to low quality, emotionless, derivative art. Things like copying the style of famous classical artist. Or still lifes and nature scenes. You know things that were impressive an eternity ago when it was impressive that people could paint real life things so well, but now they are just an insult to art by condemning it to be something that can only copy life but not create it's own life.
But the thing is, these things sell, and that's what this show was for. One painter (whose own art is mind numbingly bad) came up with the great idea, that not only do most humans not know what is good art, but they actually prefer bad art because they think it's good.
What i mean is as kids we are all told that artist like Picasso, Monet, etc. are all great painters, and that's all that most people know. As they grow up they don't continue to learn about art, and know the developments and evolution over time. So when they see a piece of art that looks like something Monet would have done, they say "oh wow, that's great art!"
People really aren't educated when it comes to art. And now I see why it is a catastrophe when it's always the first thing to be cut from school programs. There is nothing more heartbreaking when somebody sees a painting of a bowl of fruit and they say, "oh wow that looks like fruit!" Or perhaps what made me die inside was one artist who had 12 paintings of the same lady in the same pose, and had the same amount last year as well. People would say "oh there are so many of this same kind, it must be really good!" Ugh! There were a lot of this thing where somebody just painted the same thing over and over again and people lapped it up without realizing that that's the antithesis of what art is.
But the thing that made me roll my eyes the most were the ones like the painting above. Where they tried to express something but and they did it in a completely unimaginative way and was so painfully obvious that it just screams laziness. There were many of these mixing the old traditional Chinese stylized mountain scene with aspects of the modern world. But of course being so blatant an uninspired is what a lot of people want that as they can clearly see what something means, without realizing that these pictures are really not about expression at all.
So this guy came up with the idea to take advantage of this. He got together the art of many horrible artists and basically gave the people what they want, crap. As one person told me "he is a terrible artist, but brilliant at sales." He prays on people's lack of education to make sales. On the one hand it's horrible that he is taking advantage of people rather than trying to help educate them. But on the other hand, it makes me think that I should open my own gallery for bad art. Get some college students together and say "You rip off Picasso, you paint some cityscapes, you give me as many pictures of a dog with sunglasses as possible, you paint me pictures of a farmer working on a small farm and all around the farm are tall corporate buildings."
Wait nobody did that last idea at this place, but in terms of bad art that people will love, that is genius! Do I have the soullessness to be able to make money off of making the world a worse place?
