Tangled Muses: On Chelsea Martin’s ‘Tell Me I’m an Artist’
Early on in Chris Kraus’s cult feminist classic I Love Dick, the book’s heroine is shown a video made by the object of her infatuation, Dick, and concedes:
As an artist she finds Dick’s work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realize that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre’s attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junky: bad characters invite invention.)
For better or worse, I can understand and have shared Chris’s soft spot for so-called “bad art.” So has any critic who’s been seduced by or a 1970s Super 8 film. A hearty dose of bad art’s charm can be found in indie author’s new novel , a coming-of-age story about an art student in her late teens who is producing what is decidedly a bad remake of ’s , without having seen the film before.
