Quality. It is the pink elephant in the room. These days the term gets slopped around like cheap wine at an art opening. After the eighties and the insistent drum beat of derision heaped on those artists that made it big (see Robert Hughes' book Nothing if Not Critical) there was a real publicity push to define and find "quality" in the painting world. In the mid 1990's there was a chorus of ooos and ahhs over the return to quality. Christ it was like watching "Full Frontal Fashion" reports from Fashion Week tent spectaculars >>>"Well Chris...this season's line shows a return to quality...." These days you can't pick up an art rag without hearing about "quality" in someone's work. Hell I even hear it at art openings - quote - "...the quality of this passage is amazing..." But I have to ask - with so much quality out there, why is nothing great?

Postmodernism is two things and they are inseparable. One is the art practices that are taught, used and propagated by artists. The other is the market system, institutional system and the corporate sytem that flourishes around it. It is a sandwich of love complete with piles of green lettuce, dishy tomatos, gooey mayo and a dollop of grey poupon for spice. Collectors love the combo and everyone who enjoys the sandwich does as well. But the truth is a lot of us are really hungry and not for a sloppy Subway either.

After the crash in the late 1980s, galleries were in a tizzy. The list of closures and mergers was endless and a generation of artists - quietly went into that dark good night, almost never to be heard of again. A select few survived - mostly the money shot artists. Koons, Salle, Halley(sort of - but now doing quite well), Fischl, Bleckner and others. But the great unwashed hoarde that struggled to show, sell and be (and I'm including galleries, critics, curators etc in this bunch as well - go to the library and look at a few back issues of the magazines) all just dissappeared. This was Post SOHO and Pre-Chelsea. Lifestyles took a beating and I can imagine there was a collective moment when folks with second houses in the Hamptons realized that they had to hedge their bets a bit better - both theoretically and financially.

Then in the mid 90s there was the move to Chelsea as everyone distanced themselves from the stench. Along with the move came the first art fair and a new way of talking about art. During the PC years (@ 1990-95) painting was nowhere to be found. Installation, video, and fuck all were the aesthetics of the day - wrapped in the POMO speak of empowerment, textual re-reading, and subjective meaning. The problem was this stuff wasn't sexy to own. Then BOOM figurative painting returned and suddenly an old word was resurrected and used in a different way (what a POMO move that is.) Quality re-entered the lexicon ... and Man - did that word have long legs and brains. Critics began liberally spraying that word on the hot sellers and not pejoratively either. Suddenly - out of nowhere - the new generation taught by the last - had managed to conjure that missing ingredient - out of nowhere - insuring that there would be no more broke and missing generations. My work even got the q-test at one point (more on that in another post next week.) Quality is now what every gallery pushes on the collectors. Quality is shorthand for investment grade. Pushing quality was a lesson learned at the expense of art.

Look at the language used about selling artists today - Blue Chip, Investment Grade, Insitutional, Marketable. These are terms used by Wall Street and imply some form of continuity in the work, some form of prospective return as an investment. POMO like corporatization has become all about leveling the playing field so that a select few will continue to make money for the select few. This mania for control - of not only money but visual practices and theory - goes deep with the Postmodern community. In the 1990s a scandal among the auction houses showed how deep the lessons of the crash affected the art community. In "The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby's-Christie's Auction House Scandal" by Christopher Mason we learn of price fixing and collusion among the top auction houses in order to maintain the money market for art. "The antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department found that secret meetings held between the top executives of Sotheby's and Christie's were intended to eliminate competition and increase profits by agreeing to raise buyers' commissions and establish nonnegotiable terms for sellers wishing to bring items to auction." Of course this sort of "money thing" is glossed over by artists and critics - as if we are above this sort of bullshit - but the absolute truth is these same sort of practices are run in our press, classrooms and studios all under POMO theoretic control and it plays across the face of most all the work we see being made and read in the journals and history books.

POMO discourse always featured the theme of Desire. Everyone was desiring, never attaining, but always leaving a sticky trail of quality through the sands of art history. This is inherent in the fact that in order to maintain ironic distance one must be removed from the actual encounter - POMO is a critic engaging in criticism about criticism, but all the while desiring the thing it can never be or have. In critical tract after critical tract you read about how art should cultivate the unfulfilled desire which is then sublimated into art. The idea of the fetish object is promoted above all things. POMO is about finishes, shiny surfaces, well made objects - like Jimmy Choos in the bottom of a foot fancier's closet - in fact this has become such the norm that artists now contract their work out to finely trained craftsmen rather than do it themselves in order to guarantee a "well made object." Quality became the catch phrase for sale-ability, conformity and product. Donald Kuspit, one of my favorite POMOs, in a tract written in 2000 shows us the purple prose of the flowering of desire, sublimation and quality that has been shoveled around for quite a while now...

"...Quality is the mystery of being -- ontologically fundamental -- and revealed only through that peculiar kind of suffering called sublimation -- the strange suffering implicit in becoming abstract, pure. Without the excruciating suffering involved in the renunciation of the world -- the first ascetic step in abstraction, as Kandinsky said -- there is no possibility of perceiving pure sensuous quality. The renunciation of representation was a painful cleansing of the temple of art, which prepared it for the worship of pure vision."

All of this purity makes me want to retch. Abstraction doesn't have to be pure. Quality is not the mystery of being. I don't buy any of it. None of this "quality" sits well with me. It never did. Not visually, not intellectually and certainly not personally. "Quality" is ubiquitous, it means absolutely nothing. Because you paint a geometric form instead of a figure does not make you a sublimating ascetic. The mechanics of vision are anything but pure - as Hockney has said - we have wonky vision - everything is slightly skewed by our humanity. Sure I believe great art has A Quality but it is not about "quality" - it is about messy, informed, lived experience. Great art is powerful, it wrenches you to your feet, it makes you think hard about what you're seeing, it tingles your nether regions - it is about the exultation of vision over all other senses - period. Sublimation is not what I see in Las Meninas or the Scuola di San Rocco or Guernica or the Dance. These were made by artists who lived life fully and messily and passionately reported what they saw. Not one of them renounced the world for purity. Asceticism leads to parsed experience which leads to quality rather than greatness.

Yes Virginia, I understand that not everything can be great, but today, it seems, everything can have quality - especially in the POMO world. It is why we're so stymied, so self obsessed and why we are missing the boat. Let's find a way to talk about art without the q-word!