Art Crawl

Bob and the kids walk through the town’s annual art crawl while Linda’s eccentric, “fragile” sister, Gayle, hangs her paintings in Bob’s Burgers. When Louise makes fun of a painting from the art supply store, Reflections, that someone bought for $200, the Belchers are shooed away by the store’s elderly owners Edith and Harold.

When the family returns to the restaurant, Bob is horrified to discover that all of Gayle’s paintings are of animal anuses. He is convinced that they will drive customers away. Later, after Bob has started taking down Gayle’s paintings to display the kids’ artwork instead, Edith and Harold arrive at the restaurant. Edith, chairperson of the art crawl, declares Gayle’s anus paintings to be too inappropriate for the art crawl and commends Bob for taking them down. Bob, not wanting to be told how to run his business, rebukes Edith and makes the paintings a permanent fixture of the restaurant.

Bob opens the restaurant the next morning to discover that someone has painted over Gayle’s anus paintings with pink underwear. Assuming that Edith is the culprit, Bob storms down to Reflections and confronts her. When Edith denies the vandalism, he defaces every painting in the store with black dots that he says are meant to be anuses.

Edith and Harold press charges against Bob for the vandalism and bring the police to the restaurant. When Bob says he wants to press charges against Edith for the underwear paintings, Linda admits that she was the one who painted the underwear. The anuses were haunting her in her dreams, and she couldn’t bring herself to be honest with Gayle about them.

Gayle arrives with new versions of her paintings, which now include pants and “huge, pendulous breasts.” The family is in shock, before Linda lies and tells her she loves them.

A subplot involves Louise trying to make money by selling bad art to tourists during the art crawl. After discovering that Gene and Tina have no artistic talent (despite Gene’s attempt to become like van Gogh by having Louise try to cut his ear off), she recruits Andy and Ollie Pesto and another child to paint instead, forcing them to work long hours while verbally abusing them and pocketing all the money. Louise later uses some of the money to pay back Edith and Harold for the damage Bob caused in Reflections. When Bob asks where she got it from, she simply replies, “It’s art crawl.”

In its original American broadcasting, "Art Crawl" was viewed by an estimated 4.43 million viewers and received a 2.2 rating, a 6 percent share among adults between the ages of 18 and 49, an increase from last episode.[1]

Rowan Kaiser of The A.V. Club gave the episode an A, saying "It's a great feeling to be there when a show filled with potential suddenly fulfills it. First off, because you can get the feeling that you're special for being one of the few million who was actually there, live, when Bob's Burgers went from good to great. Second of all, because you can't stop laughing at how ridiculously good “Art Crawl” is. Bob's Burgers has been developing several different threads, and they all work really well here: the ineffectual liberal antagonists, Bob's stubbornness when things don't work the way he thinks they should, Gene and Tina's absurd asides, Louise's megalomania, and Linda's intense willingness to make sure everything goes smoothly."[2]

• "Art Crawl" at IMDb