On rare occasions, a thrift store or a pawnshop can yield items of extreme value, but these are hardly the places you can expect to bump into the museum director of the Louvre or the Metropolitan. But Michael Frank is the head of a museum of a different breed, and a thrift store or a flea market is exactly the sort of place he would visit whenever he wants to enrich the museum's collection.

Frank works for the Museum of Bad Art, the only museum in the world “dedicated to bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences”. The museum has three galleries in Brookline, Somerville and South Weymouth, all in the Boston area, where up to seventy pieces of atrocious artwork are displayed at a time, although the museum's actual collection numbers about 600 pieces.

“Charlie and Sheba”, a painting at the Museum of Bad Art, where “art is too bad to be ignored.”