The Bad Museum with a Good Name

 

Where would you expect to find this painting? 

In a Boston thrift store? Hanging in a museum?

(Lurking in the shadows of an eight-year old's nightmare?)

YES and YES (and most definitely, YES)

Oil on canvas, Spewing Rubik's Cubes, is amongst the 500 works of art hanging in the Museum Of Bad Art (a.k.a. MOBA) located in the Greater Boston Area. Boasting an unusual collection of “art too bad to be ignored,” MOBA is the world's only museum dedicated to celebrating bad art in all its forms. Despite having acquired most of its pieces from thrift stores and yard sales, MOBA has garnered an extraordinary amount of positive world-wide media exposure. 


The Museum Of Bad Art has been spotlighted by Wired, Rolling Stones, The London Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Today Show, CNN, Good Morning America, NPR’s Morning Edition, Yahoo! (Hilariously Bad Art online exhibit), German and South African television programs, newspapers in Norway, Denmark and Brazil, the Verizon phone book, and American Airlines’ in-flight magazines. 

Louise Sacco, co-founder and Permanent Acting Interim Executive Director of the Museum Of Bad Art, shared with pubLIZity how this BAD museum has managed to grab a lot of GOOD press. 

“HAVE THE RIGHT STORY,” asserts Sacco, a retired marketing consultant. 

MOBA’s “trashy” story began in 1994 when antiques dealer, Scott Wilson, rescued the discarded Lucy in the Field with Flowers from a curbside in Boston. Inspired by the kitschy painting (now MOBA’s signature piece), Wilson began exhibiting Lucy… and other salvaged bad art in the basement of his friends’, Jerry Reilly and Marie Jackson’s, house. Word-of-mouth quickly grew the popularity of these receptions forcing the newly christened “Museum Of Bad Art” to move into a permanent gallery six months later. 

Having the right story also means having the RIGHT message.  MOBA's core message is simple. "Art is fun," says Sacco.  "There's a lot of art that we love and it doesn't have to be traditional museum art."

 

ANSWER THE PHONE AND BE HELPFUL                                             

MOBA has adopted a “do something interesting and answer the phone” approach.  They’re responsive to requests for interviews and accommodate on-site tapings. Not only does MOBA work hard to be accessible, but they strive to, in Sacco’s words, “put out good information” by providing journalists and reporters with information, images, press kits, and the like.  In fact, MOBA worked closely with Wikipedia to ensure that their Wikipedia entry was accurate and complete.  Sacco credits MOBA’s appearance on The Today Show (with Katie Couric) to simply answering the phone and being helpful.

“KEEP THE INFORMATION OUT THERE,” advises Sacco. 

Besides maintaining a website, MOBA stays in the public eye by delivering email newsletters to their 30,000 subscribers.  Each time the newsletter is sent off into cyberspace (between 5-6 times per year), it attracts a multitude of new fans and renews media interest.  The museum also utilizes social media. MOBA's Facebook fan page (11,421 LIKES and counting) is regularly updated with pictures of new acquisitions and pieces to be auctioned on eBay from their Rejection Collection (yep, even MOBA has standards).

INVITE PEOPLE TO HAVE FUN

In the mid-90s, MOBA hosted a party to celebrate the release of their Virtual Museum Of Bad Art CD-ROM (What's a CD-ROM??).  Sacco and the MOBA staff extended an invitation to the reporter at the Boston bureau of the Wall Street Journal.  Surprisingly, the reporter accepted and attended the festivities. Ten days after the party, MOBA appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.  That article yielded the museum six subsequent years of media coverage. 

Since the aforementioned shindig, MOBA has continued to wield its special brand of art funaticism by hosting “Guest Interpretator” challenges and quirky celebrations and whimsical exhibitions that engage and create buzz amongst the bad art lovin’ community.  

Some of MOBA's most memorable events have involved car washes and kazoos. 

Their "Awash in Bad Art" exhibit took place inside the world's 1st drive-thru car wash. Select works(covered in shrink wrap) were hung inside so that they could be viewed as cars passed through.       

A charity auction benefitting Salvation Army was once held in a vacant store at a local mall. A parade and performance by the MOBA Kazoo Choir rounded out the festivities.

Thanks to the good-humored and diligent efforts of Louise Sacco and Staff, the Museum Of Bad art continues to receive a phenomenal amount of media attention and long-lasting publicity.  Having the “right” story, partying with the Wall Street Journal, and simply having fun have all contributed to earning the museum international notoriety.  However, one could argue that MOBA’s success and universal appeal can be best explained by its underlying, rather than its perceived message - NOBODY’S PERFECT.

 
In celebrating the impaired artistic visions of over-enthusiastic under-achievers, MOBA is granting everyday folks permission to embrace their own failed efforts and to forgive their shortcomings.

So, take another gander at Spewing Rubik’s Cubes.  Do you still see a grotesque Carrot Top look-alike simultaneously eating and regurgitating floating Rubik’s cube squares, OR do you behold the beauty...the beauty of the effort?  

 

A special thanks to Louise Sacco for graciously agreeing to be interviewed for pubLIZity's debut post.  

Additional resources used: http://www.museumofbadart.org/ & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Of_Bad_Art 


All pictures, except for the scary one of comedic performer, Carrot Top, were found on http://www.museumofbadart.org/.  Captions were added to the pics by pubLIZity.