Bad Art

[Martin Hash]

My wife & I migrated to Peru for the winter. We rented an apartment in Lima in La Molina, one of the nicer districts. Mostly it was good but I did have a few complaints: the pool was closed, the washing machine didn’t work & the décor was awful. I don’t know about other people but I’m insulted by bad art; so poorly done I’m sure the creator meant it to be perverse. The worst is reprints of bad art because that means at least 2 people intentionally poked me in the eye: for example, there was a monstrosity of a painting adorning the living room.

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Living room painting

Turned out, Peru is sanctuary of bad art: while visiting Iquitos, hanging in “The Yellow Rose of Texas” breakfast house, was the most horrific painting of Elvis I’ve ever seen, mostly because I think the artist was serious. There were other bad paintings by obviously the same artist for sale but the full-size Elvis actually made my chocolate bran pancakes taste bad. (Or it could have been the bran?)

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Elvis painting

I thought to myself that if I saw one more example of excruciatingly bad art, I’d write about it. In truth, I’m quite forgiving of other people’s artistic endeavors: my own art never got past the journeyman stage and I’m sure lots of people say bad things about it but when art makes your life worse, I draw the line. (I said “draw the line” in context, funny, huh?) In fact, one of my sayings is: “If you can’t tell what it is, it must be art.” I even define art in another of my quotes: “Trying not to pee on the toilet seat is sport but if you miss on purpose, that’s art.” For 3 decades, I even wrote & sold a 3D program for creating art, so I can recognize computer-generated bad art. While visiting the 5,000 year old pyramids of Caral, it was obvious that the graphics in the visitor’s center used the same stock male computer mode dozens of times, sometimes 4 in the same image!

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Visitor’s Center graphic

[C-Mag]

I actually don't mind the fishing one at the bottom. Not anything I would hang on the wall, but for a visitor center it's fine.

[Martin Hash]

I actually don't mind the fishing one at the bottom. Not anything I would hang on the wall, but for a visitor center it's fine.

More the laziness of using the same computer model in every illustration.