Caili in wonderland

WHEN BAD IS GOOD →

“There is nothing worse than good taste,” thundered the English art critic Jonathan Jones in the Guardian in 2010. “Nothing more stultifying than an array of consumer choices paraded as a philosophy of life. And there is nothing more absurd than someone who aspires to show good taste in contemporary art.”

Bad taste often passes for avant-garde taste these days—so long as the artist signals “transgressive” intent. And whereas kitsch in art was once to be assiduously disdained, art that traffics in sentimentality and bathos behind a dancing veil of ironic laughter has become highly prized. Jeff Koons, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Richard Prince, and Takashi Murakami are just a few of those who have learned that coy subversion can be popular and lucrative. As long as everyone is in on the joke that the art is satirizing its own historical codes of representation, there is nothing to be upset about.

More difficult to place is outsider art, a genre that has expanded over the last 20 years from focusing on traditional folk crafts to including obsessive outpourings by the mentally ill and flea-market pickings. Jim Shaw’s influential “Thrift Store Paintings” exhibition and book, from 1990, assembles and appropriates works by unknowns that prove to be as disturbing and complex as anything dreamed up by a schooled Surrealist. The Museum of Bad Art, founded in 1994 and now with three galleries in the Boston area, collects works by amateurs that, as its website says, have “a special quality that sets them apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent.” The sincerity and conviction of the ineffectual artist is often what is so moving.

Further muddying the issue are the many painters and sculptors who now make deliberately “bad” art. The awkward figuration and ugly color harmonies in the canvases of Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner, for example, are polemical sorties against good taste and look back to late de Chirico, Picabia’s nudes from the late 1940s, and Magritte’s période vache, all of which were similarly directed against academic surrealism. The proudly slipshod handiwork of Martin Kippenberger has spawned a school of admirers and earned him a MoMA retrospective in 2009. The gimcrack, bauble-encrusted assemblages of Rachel Harrison and Joana Vasconcelos owe as much to Kippenberger as to Rauschenberg.

Art made in a riotous spirit of bad taste not only undermines academic notions of correctness and stability, but it also renders itself virtually impervious to criticism, arming itself against attack from realists, modernists, Minimalists, and Post-Minimalists alike by gleefully confessing to its own intentionally questionable quality.

Exhibiting “bad” taste is one of the simplest ways for art to attract notice. Sophisticated practitioners cue their audience that they are simply riffing on safely outmoded styles. Currin’s female nudes, with their distorted breasts and necks, reference both soft-porn fantasy and Italian Mannerism, a style that itself was considered by earlier Renaissance artists to be in dubious taste. Murakami’s “superflat” style, reminiscent of Pop art, is an ironic take on Japan’s tradition of commercial illustration, with its penchant for cute animals and candy-colored optimism.

In many cases today, subjects and figures that were previously out-of-bounds are considered acceptable, safe, edgy, and fun, thanks to the Internet, which offers imagery without censors. The interconnectedness and fluidity of information and the larger number of art scenes on all the continents are not things that Greenberg could have imagined. The values of good taste that he stood for have long since been washed away, and many people would say good riddance.

John Waters, once the epitome of bad taste as a filmmaker, is now an art-world eminence, asked to curate exhibitions at venues like the Walker Art Center and share opinions in Artforum. His recent book Role Models includes a chapter about his art collection, which features flea-market items alongside works by artists such as Cy Twombly and Kelley. Indeed, a Kelley painting from 1991 titled Wedged Lump, which, in the words of Waters, “suggests a giant turd surrounded with comic stink marks,” hangs in his dining room.

“I’m interested in artists who are okay with being hated,” Waters said at the Walker’s media preview for his show, “Absentee Landlord,” last summer. “Because the work we hate today is often the work we end up liking and admiring in the future.”

That’s the story of Waters’s career as well. Whereas 25 years ago no TV network would have dared to screen a Waters movie and no respectable magazine would have sought his views about anything, Broadway producers now transform his scripts into musicals and there’s always a place for him in David Letterman’s guest chair.

As Waters recently admitted to a reporter, it is the “final irony” of his life that a gay Catholic underground writer- director from Baltimore is now a member of the club. His highly refined interests in kitsch, scatological humor, porn, tawdry glamour, serial killers, and other tabloid fodder anticipated by decades the zeitgeist of our time.

“I think we need a new vocabulary, because now everybody wants to be an outsider,” he told the Financial Times. “When I was one, no one wanted to be one. Counterculture won some things a long time ago. Counterculture’s in control. I’m the insider. I’m the establishment.”