DAVE HICKY ESSAY

This essay appeared in the February 2009 issue of Art in America

REVISION NUMBER FIVE

QUALITY

BY DAVE HICKEY

It's not easy to revel in the twilight of one's own relevance, but, these days, I look around and happily admit that no piece of art criticism written by me or anyone else contributed a whiff of pheromone to the fragrant panache that sustained the art world for nearly two decades as a market in luxury goods. Quality box office was quite sufficient to maintain your Ferraris, your ugly paintings and boring videos as objects of status and delectation. The fact that your Ferraris were less likely to be honored by a museum exhibition, a super gala and a spread inTown & Country made your luxury art all the more attractive as a social instrumentality, especially if you factored in the elevated levels of self-esteem derived from swanning around Sotheby's waving your little paddle.

During art's tenure as a luxury product, some small problems arose, however. First, there was the vestigial infrastructure of art enthusiasts who believed that some works of art are better than others - who imagined art has cultural and intellectual value that transcends its luxury status. These ex-arbiters of quality haven't arbitrated for a very long time, of course, but we are only now facing the cold consequences of their acquiescence. This infrastructure once compensated for art's single deficit as a luxury product: the fact that, unlike precious stones and rare metals, works of art have no intrinsic value. All their value is extrinsic. It is invested from without and over a period of time. The noisy, ongoing quarrel about "quality" that raged between collectors, critics, journalists, activists, publishers, dealers, curators, and scholars once generated a fairly stable consensus of relative value among players on the field. The economic function of this defunct colloquy was to sustain objects in public notice during moments of short money or falls from fashion.

For most of the 20th century, this infrastructure was as integral to the art market as the evaluating outliers are to financial markets - as important as Moody's, Standard & Poor's, theWall Street Journal and CNBC. Every market needs honest brokers with a stake in being right, and (to paraphrase the Furry Freak Brothers) at one time a consensus of professional respect would carry an artist through times of no money better than money would carry an artist through times of no professional respect. A few museum shows and a nice essay during a lull meant that your prices would still be there when fashion changed and the money came back. Among artists of my acquaintance, Ellsworth Kelly, Bruce Nauman, and Ed Ruscha had moments of eclipse. John Baldessari, Jules Olitski, and Jo Baer, through no fault of their own, had longer moments out of the light. A non-pecuniary consensus of esteem among professionals carried them all through the valley of the shadow.

Artists whose ascendance in the late '80s postdated this discourse of non-pecuniary investment did not fare so well when the sales curve dipped. Some of them, I'm sure, are still wondering where the help was when they needed it. Some contemporary luminaries, I suspect, will soon be wondering this as well. So where are those notorious critical squabblers whose interests and enthusiasms were purportedly immune to fashion? By the late '80s (like actors leaving rehab) they had all "moved on." They were playing it safe, driving Hondas. Once, in the '90s, a magazine editor asked if I would write a piece about David Salle's retrospective in Sweden. I said sure. The editor asked, "Well, do you want to do the 'pro' or the 'con'?"

So there it was: the editor of a major art magazine resigning his traditional power as an advocate of cultural value - withholding any appearance of tacit support for either David Salle or me for fear of damaging his precious advertising revenue. With this phrase, a publication that had once prided itself on being right opted for being fair in every sense of the word. After this, writing opinionated criticism became a chump-change opportunity to play a few sets of badminton on the lawn with Katy or Jeremy or Yve-Alain. Since an art magazine's imprimatur now meant nothing and paid less, many writers like me fell back on exhibition catalogues that gain you no exposure beyond scholarly footnotes, but do, at least, provide a spacious opportunity to write about art that you respect. By the time the new MoMA building opened, this penchant for holding one's job by withholding one's commitment had so metastasized that the New York Times Magazine ran no fewer than seven reviews of its architecture - a lot of paper to cover their glossy, marble butts.

During this period, "fairness" (read mediocrity) proliferated. Dealers diversified their offerings to disguise their personal taste, thus eroding their better judgment. Art magazines printed interviews, advance blurbs and diversity centerfolds. They followed works of art to Bali and Cairo as if they were supermodels to be photographed biennially in exotic settings. At the same time, scholarly typing began passing for exhibition reviews. American academics pretended to believe that the traditional financial disinterest of academic inquiry meant that they should not be interested in contemporary finance or inquire about it too closely. This epidemic of fatal lunacy allowed predatory sociologists to submerge the adult practice of visual art in the doggy puddle of "visual culture" wherein students might evade the mysteries of Blinky Palermo by wondering in prose whether Wolverine is the most angst-ridden of the X-Men. By the late '80s, any PhD in art history could identify the iconography of mercantile capitalism in Titian's paintings. One in 50 could tell a Titian from a Tintoretto, and auction houses snapped up those odd ducks to co-opt their expertise.

At first, some of us cognoscenti reveled in this loss of transparency. It meant we knew and you didn't. We got bargains. Occasionally, we could actually pass off good works of art as trendy objects. Eventually, though, many of my friends and colleagues who knew good from bad stopped caring, and after a decade or so of not caring, they didn't know anymore, and, for a professional in the arts, the inability to tell good art from bad is a terminal condition. It's no joke. Some works of art are demonstrably better than others, and, ultimately, it matters, because bad art disappears before our eyes. If you look and can't see anything, there's nothing there. It's elevator music, hospital furniture, AM radio. There is, in fact, so much of this high-priced confetti in Chelsea these days that one must fear that the best galleries with the most honest prices will be the first to be undeservedly wiped out.

What I am suggesting is that the art world is going through its own version of the Wall Street meltdown. When things were moving fast on the Street, and money was being made, the complicated, time-consuming task of assessing the real value of complex financial instruments became an easy corner to cut, so it was cut. Then one morning, the markets opened andnobody knew what anything was worth. Those who knew they didn't know kept mum, but the tandem magnetism between price and value evanesced anyway, and down it all went. In the art world, auction houses played the same black-box function as the now-defunct investment banks did on Wall Street. Junk went in. Gold came out. Reserve prices were amazingly manufactured. Artworks were purportedly sold, although some were guaranteed, some were bought in, some were discreetly parked, and some had their prices run up by proxies and phone-phantoms. Short of outright espionage, there was no way of knowing what sort of transaction had taken place.

This, of course, is no more than anyone has ever expected of auction houses, but now these businesses are the only players in the game speculating publicly on what art might be worth. One work sells for 10 times the price of another and we don't know why - and we damn well should, and we damn well better, but everybody's a poll watcher now, and nobody votes. There are no more coteries of opinionated lunatics arguing with coteries of entrenched fogies. There are no academic wise men, censorious black intellectuals, bellicose Brits, thoughtful connoisseurs or crusading feminists on their high horses. There are no ignorant children proclaiming that crap is crap. No outrageous queens whose touch turns muck to magic. No insightful curmudgeons or legendary collectors famous for having a "good eye." The fraught cacophony invented such value as still remains. Now it's silent, and it should be deafening, because the larger and more complex the quarrel the better the judgment that is rendered.

Today we have a list of auction prices with the ontological status of the Easter bunny, and my telephone has been ringing. For the first time in 20 years, old acquaintances are calling about that Olitski they bought to cover the earthquake crack, about the Matthew Barney for which they ordered the exquisite vitrine, about their itty-bitty Richard Tuttle and about that Keith Tyson thing, whatever it is. All I can say is hold and pray, and, henceforth, apply this formula:quality is quantity. The quality of an art object is directly proportional to the quantity of something that it gives to someone who belongs to some constituency of interest. Critics, scholars, collectors, dealers, curators and decorators expect different things in different measures. The works of art that deliver the most stuff to the most people and serve the most complex constituencies for the lonest time are the very best ones. Period.

So, whenever I get the chance, I look at art and ask myself: how long will I remember this and how precisely? Then, more critically, how long will other people remember it? (This is a social discourse.) Is this work beter than works that are similarly priced? Is it better than the blank white wall upon which it hangs? Is it better than everything and, if so, how long will I love it? How much do I think about it? How much would I miss it? How much would I pay for it? How much would I sell it for? What would I trade for it? How many people agree with me? Who are they? How complex is the constellation of objects in which it resides? How deep is its historical resonance? How much does it mean, and how much does it matter?

These are not difficult questions unless you're too busy to think about them. So I'm assuming that, as you read this, business is less than optimal, and you have some time on your hands. If this should be the case, please remember that you can't just watch. The invisible hand of the market is not the hand of God. Weeds spring up when you don't mow; so mow. Great art is diminished by the junk that surrounds it; so clean the stables. We will never have a shakeout unless some things get shaken out and some get saved. To do this properly, commitments must be made. Cultural consequences must be meditated upon as if they mattered - because they do.