Great Horrible Art

My high school History teacher used to say that the political spectrum isn't a linear construct with Conservatives at one end and Liberals at the other.

 

 

Instead, he pointed out that the radical ideas at either end of the spectrum tend to bleed across into each other. Picture it more like a circle: 

(Or maybe a Mobius Strip.
Who doesn't love a good mind-blowing Mobius Strip?)

When you think about it, that concept applies to all sorts of things. The spectrum wraps around and brings together two things you thought were polar opposites, but they turn out to be perfect neighbors.

Think of food combinations that are so wrong they're right:  banana bacon cookies? curly fries dipped in a chocolate milkshake? salted fruit?

Think of how things get muddy at the extreme ends of the emotional scale: you laugh until you cry? cry until you laugh? One state connects right across into the other, and even though it all seems to happen through some weird backchannel that makes no sense, it still happens.

 

That brings us to art. Art can be so horrible that it's brilliant. So brilliant that it's horrible.

 

Two years ago, while walking through an all-comers amateur art show on the med campus, I came across a hilariously bad painting. A black jaguar on a green background that made me silent-laugh so hard I coughed a little. Since that moment, it has stood out in my mind as one of the most wonderful pieces of terrible art in the history of wonderfully terrible art.

 

Three weeks ago on call, I was walking into the hospital in the middle of the night when I turned a corner and there it was, like it had been suddenly resurrected from memory and hung up on the wall again:

 



 

Look at its awesome finger-toes! And hind hooves! And the way its initially-deformed rump has been painted over with a green that will never match any other green on that canvas. The crinky tail. The red watermelon-slice mouth right smack on the front of its creepy human face! The nearly-neckless head sprouting straight up out of its right shoulder, and the faint silhouette of a fifth leg. 

It's clearly the unapologetic work of a genius.

Or a 3rd grader.

Or a genius!

Or a 3rd grader!

Or a genius.

 

And there's more!

Like this gem featuring Abraham Lincoln, some sort of Star Trek Frankenstein, a blue duck, Shakespeare and robots:

And the jaguar's companion piece, The Rhinoceros:

Plus this one entitled After Dinner Chat:

 

Take a closer look at the painting above the couch there. Wouldn't your life be more complete if you had a sofa-sized painting of a blonde lady running away from a deranged hybrid fox-mongoose-orange-crocodile on a beach? It's weighty stuff.

 

Congratulations Steven Sorscher, whoever you are.

For what it's worth, I vote "genius."