“How do you decide what has quality and what doesn’t? This problem exists on every level. Why are so many artworks produced each year? Why are so many art festivals and temporary projects instrumentalized for marketing purposes? What does art serve, if it serves anything?”
—Pierre Bal-Blanc from the Cluster network’s “How to Begin Living in the Trees?,” 1: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/how-to-begin-living-in-the-trees/ e-flux journal no. 53, March 2014
For me, judgement comes from first understanding a historical sense of art, then an exposure to the particular art object or event, then understanding the context and period and finally deciding if it is sincere, illuminating, beautiful etc.
In my opinion, If we only see art in its final presentation and from the distribution view, then we will not find the answer, there’s no exact structure in art development, its very moody. That’s why perhaps it is hard to compare the quality of art with other product from industry like craft or clothing,etc.
But if we see it from other view, for example the development of artistic path of an artist. and how does she/he react to the wider issue, then we might find quality
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem
stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
Und so verhalt ich mich denn und verschlucke den Lockruf
dunkelen Schluchzens. Ach, wen vermögen
wir denn zu brauchen? Engel nicht, Menschen nicht,
und die findigen Tiere merken es schon,
daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind
in der gedeuteten Welt.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly take me to its heart,
I would vanish into its stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so,
because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can
we make use of? Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world.
Rilke response is the only one I can think of, on what should be the best judge of this vague ‘quality’ in art.
This passage from a Dave Hickey essay (I know) rings mostly true for me:
“The quality of an art object is directly proportional to the amount of ‘something’ that a work of art gives to someone who belongs to an engaged constituency of interest. Quality is assessed by the raw volume of buzz it elicits from critics, scholars, collectors, dealers, consultants, curators, and decorators. All these arbiters expect different things from art in different measures, so the works of art that deliver the most stuff to the most constituencies, that sustain the most complex constituency of admirers for the longest time, are the very best ones.”
Speaking of quality in terms of dualistic judgement is a radical answer to the hope that we could look outward and recognise what we see. The act of seeing, of engaging across the opening, what is called recognition, can not be conducted alone, in one direction. It is a relation rather than an act. Therefore a quality as such is a dynamic process beyond categorisations.
I never consider what has quality and what does not in art. It seems to me to be a kind of nonsense-question.