Problem Statement

One drawback to museums that we found in our exercise at the Museum of Fine Arts was the rather elitist nature of many museums. With the advent and subsequent proliferation of personal art and media hosting websites, such as DeviantArt, Flickr, and Vimeo, we can see that there are many artists in the world whose work is not and will probably never be featured in a material museum, whether due to obscurity of the artist or quality of their art. This project hopes to highlight these exclusionary tendencies of museums by creating a dynamic virtual museum of bad art.

Approach

In this project, I hope to create a “Virtual Museum of Bad Art”. By “bad art”, I am referring not only to the quality of the art, but also the value judgements made by traditional museums that relegate this art outside of the museum space. I hope to build a virtual, web-hosted museum that features art scraped daily from personal art and media hosting sites, such as those mentioned above. Some extra features might include human-curated exhibits, machine-curated exhibits (perhaps through a ‘search’ function?), and a mechanism to allow visitors to curate their own exhibit.

Audience

My audience is anyone annoyed by the elitist nature of some art museums, artists themselves, and people who want to curate art exhibits on the web. I less expect this project to be a useful, lasting tool; rather, I see it as an exercise or an art piece in itself.

Skills Needed

Scraping, web programming

Note: I do not currently have a group for this idea; if you have programming skills and are interested in this project, please let me know!