Quality ...?

Piece in WSJournal on "Shopping Mall Masters"

Christian Riese Lassen's "Beyond Hana's Gate" sold for $225,000. The painting is one of a romantic series set on a Maui beach.

"To the art world's chagrin, painters once known for $10 posters are selling original works for up to $300,000. Our reporter on Day-Glo sunsets, cruise-ship auctions and photorealistic unicorns.
By KELLY CROW
July 14, 2006; Page W1

Howard Behrens isn't the sort of artist to have his works sold by a top auction house or exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. But that hasn't stopped him from getting paid like one.

When Mr. Behrens got his start in the early 1980s, his brightly colored Italian cafés and sun-dappled French gardens were big sellers as $20 posters or $1,000 limited-edition prints at shops such as the Village Gallery at Brea Mall in Brea, Calif. But thanks to growing demand at midtier galleries and on cruise ships, Mr. Behrens is increasingly focusing on original oil paintings. A couple of canvases showing a garden path and a lily-pad pond -- his tributes to Monet -- just went for $50,000 each, roughly the same price paid three months ago at Christie's for an intricate ink drawing of a cat's eyes by Lucian Freud. "I hit the jackpot," Mr. Behrens says.

Howard Behrens painted "Giverny Lily Pond," one piece of a Monet tribute series, in 2001. Ocean Galleries, in Stone Harbor, N.J., sold the painting for $50,000.

FRAME SHOP TO FINE ART

There's a new group of contemporary artists fetching six figures a pop. Though hardly embraced by the art-world cognoscenti, artists who are known for neon sunsets, frolicking dolphins and photorealistic unicorns are increasingly selling at prices to rival critical art darlings like Rachel Whiteread, Richard Diebenkorn and Franz Kline. Their posters may still adorn the walls of dentists' offices, nursing homes and chain-hotel rooms, but their original canvases can sell for anywhere from $10,000 to $300,000, roughly double from five years ago. Often bypassing art hubs like New York and London, the artists reign over their own product-licensing empires and gallery circuits, making marquee stops in Las Vegas and coastal cities like Coconut Grove, Fla. Most have waiting lists and fan clubs; a few sport taglines like the "Painter of Light," "Picasso of Glass" and "King of the Line."

The piece goes on , but you get the idea.
Led me to think of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"In this book, Pirsig explores the meaning of the concept "quality" (a term which he capitalizes). In the sequel (Lila: An Inquiry into Morals), Pirsig expands his exploration of Quality into a complete metaphysics which he calls The Metaphysics of Quality. The Metaphysics of Quality is a philosophy, a theory about reality; it asks questions such as what is real, what is good and what is moral."