THE DEATH OF QUALITY (AND WHY WE'RE NOT CRYING ABOUT IT)
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to an art exhibition, signed it "R. Mutt," titled it Fountain, and asked the art world a question it still hasn't fully answered: What makes something art? In 2025, an AI can generate a urinal in the style of Duchamp in 0.3 seconds. It can make you a thousand urinals. It can make them in the style of Picasso, Warhol, Basquiat, your dead grandmother, or "trending on ArtStation." The question isn't "What makes something art?" anymore. The question is: "Does it even matter?"
Welcome to LO QUALITY (SORRY).
This exhibition is not an answer. It's a provocation, a middle finger, a laugh, and a lament all rolled into one messy, unapologetic package. It's three artists responding to the collapse of quality as a meaningful concept in contemporary culture. Because here's the thing: quality didn't die naturally. It was murdered. By mass markets. By algorithmic feeds. By the commodification of literally everything. By cultural stupidity so profound that we've lost any shared barometer for "good" or "bad."
And now? Now we're in the wreckage, trying to make art in a post-quality world.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF QUALITY (AND ITS ASSASSINATION)
Let's rewind.
For centuries, "quality" in art meant something relatively stable: technical skill, mastery of craft, adherence to (or thoughtful rebellion against) established traditions. From the Renaissance through the Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, and Realist movements, there was a canon. You could argue about it, sure, but it existed. Michelangelo was great because he could carve marble like no one else. Rembrandt was a master of light. These weren't just opinions; they were widely held truths.
Then came Modernism, and everything got interesting.
The Impressionists said: screw your perfect draftsmanship, we're painting light. The Cubists said: screw your perspective, reality has multiple dimensions. The Dadaists—bless them—said: screw everything, art is whatever we say it is, and meaning is a bourgeois lie. Duchamp's urinal wasn't just a joke; it was a bomb planted at the foundation of aesthetic value.
The 20th century spent decades detonating that bomb. Abstract Expressionism elevated gesture and emotion over representation. Pop Art collapsed the distinction between high and low culture—Warhol's soup cans were both a celebration and a critique of mass production. Conceptual Art declared that the idea was the art, not the object. By the time we hit Postmodernism, "quality" was a suspect term, tainted by elitism, gatekeeping, and the tyranny of dead white male European standards.
But here's what happened: we didn't replace the old measures of quality with new ones. We just... gave up on the concept entirely.
THE DIGITAL APOCALYPSE
Enter the 21st century, and things accelerated beyond recognition.
The internet democratized art production. Suddenly everyone had access to Photoshop, digital cameras, recording software, publishing platforms. This was supposed to be liberation—and in some ways, it was. Marginalized voices found audiences. Barriers to entry collapsed. The gatekeepers lost their monopoly.
But democratization had a dark side: infinite content. When everyone can make art, when every platform is flooded with images, videos, music, writing, the sheer volume becomes paralyzing.
How do you determine what's good when there are ten million options? You can't. So algorithms stepped in to decide for you.
And algorithms don't care about quality. They care about engagement.
They care about clicks, likes, shares, watch time, bounce rates. They optimize for virality, not value. They A/B test until they find the formula that keeps your eyes on the screen the longest. And that formula? It's rarely the weird, challenging, difficult, genuinely original stuff. It's the smooth, the pleasant, the comfortable, the algorithmically determined middle ground.
Technical skill became irrelevant. Why spend years learning to paint when you can apply a filter? Why master composition when an AI can generate a thousand "perfect" images based on a text prompt? Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion—these tools are astonishing, but they've also obliterated the equation that used to tie effort to value.
Ideas collapsed. Nuance disappeared. Everything got flattened into content, optimized for consumption, designed to be scrolled past in 2.3 seconds. Attention became the only currency, and quality—whatever that word once meant—became a quaint, outdated concern.
We're living in the aftermath. The robots lead. We follow. And nobody knows what "good" means anymore.
ENTER: LO QUALITY (SORRY)
So what do you do when the entire historical, canonical idea of quality has been subverted, commercialized, and algorithmically pulverized?
You make art that acknowledges the collapse. You refuse to pretend that the old rules still apply. You embrace the absurdity, the lo-fi, the half-assed, the unserious. You make work that doesn't apologize for failing to meet standards that no longer exist.
That's LO QUALITY (SORRY).
This exhibition features 3 artists who are done playing the game by rules that stopped making sense years ago. They're making work that is simultaneously sincere and ironic, crafted and careless, provocative and playful. It's punk. It's pop. It's Dada reincarnated for the age of TikTok and ChatGPT.
THE DEATH OF QUALITY (AND WHY WE'RE NOT CRYING ABOUT IT)
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to an art exhibition, signed it "R. Mutt," titled it Fountain, and asked the art world a question it still hasn't fully answered: What makes something art? In 2025, an AI can generate a urinal in the style of Duchamp in 0.3 seconds. It can make you a thousand urinals. It can make them in the style of Picasso, Warhol, Basquiat, your dead grandmother, or "trending on ArtStation." The question isn't "What makes something art?" anymore. The question is: "Does it even matter?"
Welcome to LO QUALITY (SORRY).
This exhibition is not an answer. It's a provocation, a middle finger, a laugh, and a lament all rolled into one messy, unapologetic package. It's three artists responding to the collapse of quality as a meaningful concept in contemporary culture. Because here's the thing: quality didn't die naturally. It was murdered. By mass markets. By algorithmic feeds. By the commodification of literally everything. By cultural stupidity so profound that we've lost any shared barometer for "good" or "bad."
And now? Now we're in the wreckage, trying to make art in a post-quality world.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF QUALITY (AND ITS ASSASSINATION)
Let's rewind.
For centuries, "quality" in art meant something relatively stable: technical skill, mastery of craft, adherence to (or thoughtful rebellion against) established traditions. From the Renaissance through the Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, and Realist movements, there was a canon. You could argue about it, sure, but it existed. Michelangelo was great because he could carve marble like no one else. Rembrandt was a master of light. These weren't just opinions; they were widely held truths.
Then came Modernism, and everything got interesting.
The Impressionists said: screw your perfect draftsmanship, we're painting light. The Cubists said: screw your perspective, reality has multiple dimensions. The Dadaists—bless them—said: screw everything, art is whatever we say it is, and meaning is a bourgeois lie. Duchamp's urinal wasn't just a joke; it was a bomb planted at the foundation of aesthetic value.
The 20th century spent decades detonating that bomb. Abstract Expressionism elevated gesture and emotion over representation. Pop Art collapsed the distinction between high and low culture—Warhol's soup cans were both a celebration and a critique of mass production. Conceptual Art declared that the idea was the art, not the object. By the time we hit Postmodernism, "quality" was a suspect term, tainted by elitism, gatekeeping, and the tyranny of dead white male European standards.
But here's what happened: we didn't replace the old measures of quality with new ones. We just... gave up on the concept entirely.
THE DIGITAL APOCALYPSE
Enter the 21st century, and things accelerated beyond recognition.
The internet democratized art production. Suddenly everyone had access to Photoshop, digital cameras, recording software, publishing platforms. This was supposed to be liberation—and in some ways, it was. Marginalized voices found audiences. Barriers to entry collapsed. The gatekeepers lost their monopoly.
But democratization had a dark side: infinite content. When everyone can make art, when every platform is flooded with images, videos, music, writing, the sheer volume becomes paralyzing.
How do you determine what's good when there are ten million options? You can't. So algorithms stepped in to decide for you.
And algorithms don't care about quality. They care about engagement.
They care about clicks, likes, shares, watch time, bounce rates. They optimize for virality, not value. They A/B test until they find the formula that keeps your eyes on the screen the longest. And that formula? It's rarely the weird, challenging, difficult, genuinely original stuff. It's the smooth, the pleasant, the comfortable, the algorithmically determined middle ground.
Technical skill became irrelevant. Why spend years learning to paint when you can apply a filter? Why master composition when an AI can generate a thousand "perfect" images based on a text prompt? Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion—these tools are astonishing, but they've also obliterated the equation that used to tie effort to value.
Ideas collapsed. Nuance disappeared. Everything got flattened into content, optimized for consumption, designed to be scrolled past in 2.3 seconds. Attention became the only currency, and quality—whatever that word once meant—became a quaint, outdated concern.
We're living in the aftermath. The robots lead. We follow. And nobody knows what "good" means anymore.
ENTER: LO QUALITY (SORRY)
So what do you do when the entire historical, canonical idea of quality has been subverted, commercialized, and algorithmically pulverized?
You make art that acknowledges the collapse. You refuse to pretend that the old rules still apply. You embrace the absurdity, the lo-fi, the half-assed, the unserious. You make work that doesn't apologize for failing to meet standards that no longer exist.
That's LO QUALITY (SORRY).
This exhibition features 3 artists who are done playing the game by rules that stopped making sense years ago. They're making work that is simultaneously sincere and ironic, crafted and careless, provocative and playful. It's punk. It's pop. It's Dada reincarnated for the age of TikTok and ChatGPT.