When Bad Art Is Good
(Page 2 of 3)
March / April 2003
By David Byrne, From the introduction to a new book on Mexican street art
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Sure, it is funny, the clunky layout and the sloppy painting on most of these images, but everyone knows that like these images, a taco on the street tastes better than one from Taco Bell. And there lies the key.
Street tacos actually are better. They feel better and smell better. They are less perfect, less clean (certainly), less high-tech, and there are no groovy advertising campaigns to back them up. But the quesadilla con flores that one can order (during the right season) on the street, with a cold cerveza, is something that the perfection of a chain can never approach.
Perfection, one must conclude, is not actually perfect at all. In fact, it is almost the complete opposite. Perfection is bad. But bad is good. But bad perfection is not good, only good bad is good. It’s all very simple.
If these works are authentic, real, true, human—what then are the works made using sophisticated software programs, elegantly designed and with beautiful, tasteful graphics? Are they inauthentic because they are well done? Is perfection not also real? Is not the antiseptic globalized world just another kind of real? Isn’t a false thing that everyone believes in then a real thing? And, of course, isn’t it the real that many of these self-taught artists and signmakers aspire to? Aren’t they just dying to be corrupted?
Well, it might all be a matter of semantics, but if one is to assume that “real” infers having some basis in life and living as we know it, then the products of globalization are not, in fact, real. They are cleaned-up versions of those funky kiosks. They are imitations of things that are real—which, in fact, the march of globalization seeks to eradicate. The global wave would wash away all of these originals and leave only their copies. A kind of pod people world.
The new attitude expressed toward crummy artifacts is that they are evidence of the resistance of the real to the unreal. If the unreal at various points and places around the world manages to completely obliterate the real, as it has done in many parts of the industrialized countries, then the real itself will eventually become merely a memory, a quaint story, a picture in a book of something that no longer exists. Colonial Williamsburg, Main Street USA, or Warwick Castle. The real is unreal in many places because it is no longer there.