No joke, this is today's Featured Article at the Wikipedia. It gets my vote for the best Wikipedia article EVER:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Bad_Art Although the museum's motto is "Art too bad to be ignored", MOBA holds rigorous standards as to what they will accept. According to Marie Jackson, "Nine out of ten pieces don't get in because they're not bad enough. What an artist considers to be bad doesn't always meet our low standards." As stated in the introduction to The Museum of Bad Art: Masterworks, the primary attribute of an objet d'art to be acquired by MOBA is that it must have been seriously attempted by someone making an artistic statement. A lack of artistic skill is not essential for a work to be included; a prospective painting or sculpture for the collection ideally should "(result) in a compelling image", or as honorary curator Ollie Hallowell stated, the art must have an "Oh my God" quality.
An important criterion for inclusion is that a painting or sculpture must not be boring. Michael Frank says they are not interested in commercial works like Dogs Playing Poker: "We collect things made in earnest, where people attempted to make art and something went wrong, either in the execution or in the original premise." Montserrat College of Art used MOBA's exhibition as a demonstration to its students that "sincerity is still important, and pureness of intent is valid".
MOBA accepts unsolicited works if they meet its standards. Frequently, curators consider works by artists who display an intensity or emotion in the art that they are unable to reconcile with their level of skill. The museum dedicated a show to "relentless creativity" in an exhibition titled "I Just Can't Stop" that was covered by local news and CNN. Other artists are clearly technically proficient, but attempted an experiment that did not end well. Dean Nimmer, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art (also holding the title of MOBA's Executive Director of Good Taste), noted the parallels between the Museum of Bad Art's standards and those of other institutions: "They take the model of a museum of fine arts and apply the same kind of criteria to acceptance for bad work ... (Their rules) are very similar to a gallery or museum that says 'Well, our area is really installation art or realist paintings or neo-post-modern abstractions.'"
MOBA does not collect art created by children, or art traditionally perceived as lesser in quality, such as black velvet paintings, paint-by-numbers, kitsch, or factory-produced art—including works specifically created for tourists. Curators are also not interested in crafts such as latch hook rug kits. MOBA curators suggest that more appropriate venues for such works would be the "Museum of Questionable Taste, The International Schlock Collection, or the National Treasury of Dubious Home Decoration".
The museum is located in Boston.
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