A BLUE woman and her red daughter smile with the hungry mouths of zombie maniacs. The hand of a Bigfoot grazes the breast of a topless unicorn mermaid. Faces decorate the pregnant belly of a pantsless man-boy.

It’s the wondrous, if not always wonderful, world of art so bad it’s good — or at least great fun to look at.

With its U.F.O.’s, suicidal clowns, smiling genitals and other shocking, humorous or bleakly sentimental imagery, “bad art” — or “vernacular painting” and “found art” in polite circles — has achieved the status of a genre, a tiny but devoted corner of the art world. It’s a place where the passion of an amateur is prized over the skill of a technician and where an artist’s identity is of little or no importance. It’s neither kitsch (too cheery) nor camp (too smart) nor outsider (way too good and way too expensive). The best bad art is anonymous, strange, clumsy and cheap (or free, if you’re lucky).

The paradox of placing these works within the art world at all has roots in the controversy surrounding the legitimacy of Dada and Art Brut in past decades. It was a 1991 exhibition at the Chelsea gallery Metro Pictures, “Thrift Store Paintings,” that really put bad art on the map. The show of ugly children, distorted landscapes and other oddities, along with a book with the same title, were the brainchild of the artist Jim Shaw, a longtime collector of the horribly wonderful.