Bad Painting
"Bad" Painting is the name given to a trend in American figurative painting in the 1970s by critic and curator, Marcia Tucker (1940–2006). She curated an exhibition of the same name, featuring the work of fourteen artists, most unknown in New York at the time, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. The exhibition ran from January 14 to February 28, 1978. "Bad" Painting was not a demonstration of technical incompetence, poor artistic judgement, amateur or outsider dabbling, although the term is commonly used for these. For Tucker, it denoted a more focused or deliberate disrespect for recent styles. The press release for the exhibition summarised "Bad" Painting as ‘…an ironic title for ‘good painting’, which is characterized by deformation of the figure, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources, and fantastic and irreverent content. In its disregard for accurate representation and its rejection of conventional attitudes about art, ‘bad’ painting is at once funny and moving, and often scandalous in its scorn for the standards of good taste.’ Her use of quotation marks around "Bad" points to this special meaning. "Bad" here, is thus a term of approval for the more eccentric and amusing variations on certain accepted styles, at that time.
Famous quotes containing the words bad and/or painting:
“As they say, when a man begins to have bad luck, even clabber can break his head.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)