Friday night Sam and I went to the benign Culver City Art Walk.  This Art Walk consisted of five or six galleries in a row on one street.  Ordinarily this would be great except for two things. 1) no parking 2) most of the art was complete crap.

At one of the galleries we found the ultimate example of bad art (passing for good).  As we walked in another patron was leaving and exclaimed “this kinda shit pisses me off!” 

What kinda shit was she talking about?  well… see for yourself:

We found a CV for the artist – Joe Bradley – in the back of the gallery.  The show was/is called “Like a Turkey Thru Corn.”  If the above photos aren’t enough, you really have to see the “walkthrough” video here.

This exemplifies all that can be bad about modern art.  These “paintings” consist of raw canvas and grease pencil.  Some write-ups about other shows are unintentionally obvious about his horrible work.  The first quote is actually for the show you see above:

The paintings presented here, however, continue the artist’s beloved and maligned new Schmagoo series, first presented in New York last fall. A somewhat ridiculous word, “Schmagoo” originates from the Beat-era street slang for heroin. It is this wry semiotic pairing that compels the artist to take a primitive approach

Executed on cheap pre-fab canvases, and painted with intentional mediocrity, Bradley’s paintings are immediately sympathetic in their impoverished aesthetic. Towering with a commanding primitivism

Bradley has said his work is “intentionally shoddy” and “pathetic”

This is why I didn’t enjoy art school, because I had to attend with no-talent hacks like this, who were praised for their brilliance by the class (and professors) while my work was dismissed because “her arm is too long” or “his skin tone is too red.”

I should note that Joe Bradley doesn’t have an MFA, and there is only one reason he can get away with all of this – his Bachelors is from the Rhode Island School.  To anyone unfamiliar with the art world – having a degree from the Rhode Island school is like having an MBA from Harvard, nobody questions you.  Even when you start a war on the premise of “preemptive strike.”