Does Quality Exist? Does it Matter?

THE novelist Rick Moody tracked me down recently and asked me to go back and forth with him over the issue of aesthetic quality. He — as an emissary of the literary blog The Rumpus — was especially interested in the notion of art that was “born to be bad.”

We chewed on this issue for a while — connecting the argument of my book with Bob Dylan’s new album of Sinatra covers, which Rick considers bad in profound and glorious ways. Here’s part of one of his questions:

So the question is: does quality exist? This is a funny question, because it is an immemorial question, and, as such, it is a question that in some ways appears to have been solved since Aristotle.

My conversation with the Ice Storm novelist is here.