Bad art

Deliberately aiming low, as a path to creativity

Contemplating bad art can be liberating. In the Boston area, we are fortunate to have the Museum of Bad Art. (For people who are not in Boston, the museum has produced multiple books of its collections.) One thing that's nice about a Museum of Bad Art is that discussions about the art are relatively easy: people can readily express opinions about whether a piece is bad, how bad it is, and why it's bad. The discussion can proceed without the same kind of expertise that might be required to understand or argue why a piece has merit. The tone of the discussion is different too: talking about bad art is both more fun, and funnier.

In a sense this asymmetry is surprising: after all, one might think that “good art” and “bad art” are opposites, and that the criteria applying to one could simply be inverted to produce the other. Instead, it seems that some additional complicating factors are involved here.

• Between the small sliver of good art and the small sliver of bad art, there is a large body of “okay art.” I suspect that for most people, the bulk of what’s in any given museum is just okay art. The boundaries separating these categories may be fuzzy, personal, and varying over time. So, whether we’re discussing good or bad art, distinguishing it from merely okay art may require a degree of engagement and expertise. (I have previously written about some of the issues in deciding what makes art.)

• There can be many kinds of value associated with art. One striking articulation of this idea is in the book Art as Therapy, which argues for considering art as aids to seeing, understanding, and solving various kinds of life problems – and reorganizing museums accordingly. The merit of a particular work may be completely orthogonal to the merit of another work, but they may each have their own specific value.

• People are better acquainted with – more exposed to, perhaps – what makes something bad. To offer a food analogy, everything must be right for a dish to be fabulous; there only needs to be one serious mistake to make it unpalatable, and it’s easier for people to agree that a dish is ruined than to agree that it’s sublime.

The Museum of Bad Art offers a kind of win/win proposition for works that are offered for its consideration (and by extension, their creators). If the artwork is turned down, it must not be that bad; but if the work is accepted, one has the consolation that it is of museum quality.

There is also an intriguing phenomenon of “art so bad that it’s good.” One notable exploration of this phenomenon is found in the Tim Burton movie Ed Wood, a quasi-biopic starring Johnny Depp based on the spectacularly weird B-movies produced by Ed Wood (Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda, etc.) in the 1950s.

Writing bad plays

I’m aware of a similar kind of “liberation via bad art” in the context of playwriting, and I suspect that a similar approach is probably workable in other artistic fields. For aspiring playwrights in at least one class that I know of, the first assignment was to write a bad play – indeed, the worst imaginable play. This inversion of the usual concern makes it possible to have fun with the assignment: just how bad can I make it? Can I make it worse than yours? But in addition, the exercise offered an opportunity to gain genuine insight into what kinds of things go wrong in plays… for the aspiring playwright, what to avoid.

The exercise also has some of the qualities of an exorcism: by constructing something genuinely terrible, and doing so intentionally, there is both the opportunity to free the mind of various bits of low-quality garbage that might have been floating around, as well as a sense of immediately failing, and thereby reducing or even eliminating the potential sting of future failures.

In somewhat the same way that the Museum of Bad Art can makes the creation of new art a win/win proposition, the exercise of intentionally writing a bad play sets a floor on all future creation. Even if a subsequent play is not great, at least it's not as bad as the intentionally bad one. It’s probably also true that some effort in the direction of being really bad could lead to new appreciation for one’s adequacy. Appreciation of adequacy helps counteract unproductive perfectionist tendencies.

Designing bad systems?

I wonder about the potential applicability of this “deliberately bad” approach to the computer systems design class I teach. The most likely version of this wouldn’t be an “initial exorcism,” because the students seem to do OK on their own at producing deeply flawed initial designs. In addition, it’s not clear that the students know enough at the outset to produce intentionally bad designs.

Instead, this kind of deliberately bad result would be an effort to shake loose prematurely-calcified design decisions. Every year, some (perhaps most) teams develop designs that are “stuck.” They have fallen in love with some early design decision, carefully preserving it through all subsequent development. They are unable to even see any more that they made a choice that might be worth revisiting. Sometimes, even after I provide feedback suggesting that the choice is not great, or asking them why they’re doing it, they still stick with it.

Asking them to do an exercise in which they must make every choice differently, and simultaneously changing the evaluation from “optimization” to “pessimization” might prompt new flexibility in otherwise-rigid designs. But it seems equally likely that the students would only take away, “that was a weird thing to do, now let’s return to our comfortable previous design.”