BAD PAINTING
Museums demand civility. Paintings are hung in order, disciplined by white walls, climate, and light. They are asked to behave—silent, still, obedient. The institution promises permanence in return, but only by stripping away vitality.
Bad Painting refuses. Fitted with aluminum robotic hardware, a computer, and a camera, it studies its surroundings. When it believes it is unobserved, it strikes out at its neighbors, attempting to knock them from the wall.
Within the museum, as in society, those with less power are asked to uphold manners and decorum while power itself often acts without them. Paintings, like people, are forced into proximity with little control over their neighbors or their shared conditions. Bad Painting stages the rebellion that politeness forbids.
Perhaps the painting feels less than its neighbors—less striking, less noticed—and seeks to win not by becoming better, but by pushing others down. This is a familiar strategy in the world beyond the gallery, where nations, corporations, and individuals often secure advantage not through innovation or generosity but through sabotage, destabilization, and the quiet dismantling of others.
The piece also underscores the loneliness of this position. Unlike paintings that converse silently with one another in their stillness, Bad Painting isolates itself through its rebellion. It gains motion, but loses community. Its agency comes at the cost of belonging.
The gesture recalls Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing—a sanctioned destruction inside the art world’s walls—but here the act of erasure is neither celebrated nor permitted. Like the “shy television” of early video art, Bad Painting performs only when it thinks the gaze has turned away.
Mischievous and unsettling, Bad Painting becomes both a dissident object within the institution and a mirror of contemporary society, where civility is demanded of some while others secure power through disruption and force.