The Best of the Worst of the Bad Art Gallery

Publisher Marketing: Good art forces us to ask ourselves questions. It challenges our assumptions and opens us up to new ideas. Bad art, surprisingly, does something even more magical. It makes us envision the artist, the person who sat in a studio or workshop or Walgreen's parking lot for hours and created something. Who was this jerk? What kind of big, dumb, unskilled idiot were they? It's easy to imagine the artists like this, blindly punching a canvas with a brush, all slavering jowls and dead eyes. But I don't think it's fair to say the unknowns in our collection are without spirit. None of these works are boring, none of them are uninspired. They have a zest to them, a resolve. A fear to face the Inevitability of Failure and sit down with it for a cup of tea. We're sure many of these artists thought their paintings were "bad," too. But they persevered and finished them. They fought the terror of failure- that primal fear we all share, that makes all of us want to give up, want to take the easy road-they fought that fear with every single brushstroke, thumbtack, and hammerfall. They finished what they started. And that beautiful flower of humanity bore for us a deformed fruit. Take a bite, won't you? ABOUT MISSION B. A. G. (BAD ART GALLERY): Only the finest bad art from esteemed San Francisco Bay Area collections (thrift stores, yard sales, flea markets) presented in a ritzy Inner Mission gallery with enlightening (and hilarious) catalog notes. Brought to you by SF IndieFest, www.sfindie.com Contributor Bio:  Cairns, David David Cairns was chief music critic of the "Sunday Times" from 1983 to 1992, having earlier been music critic and arts editor of the "Spectator" and a writer for the "Financial Times" and the "New Statesman". From 1967 to 1972 he worked for the London branch of Phonogram. He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Center in Santa Monica.