Flight to Quality Art

I'm terrifically busy at the moment. Not Productive, but Busy, which everyone knows is quite different. Anyway, for all of the original reasons why I decided to write this in the first place, I thought I'd rather write this than postpone it until I have more time.

The subject for today is something to do with cultural relativism. Maybe by the end of the rant you'll know better what the title ought to be.

Throughout the first stage of the recent global financial crisis, many observers were quick to point out a market trend known as the 'flight to quality'.

This means that investors in each major market moved from investments perceived as riskier into those perceived as safer. For example, you might move out of GM and into Ford; or out of commercial property and into agricultural property; in a more extreme case, out of Argentinian bonds and into US Treasury bonds.

My confusion is about the arbitrary, judgmental use of the word 'quality'. The point is that the 'safer' assets ought to be seen as just that - safer. Most emphatically not better. Indeed, the market ought to price the riskier assets in a way that makes them provide a sufficiently better return to compensate for the extra risk.

Something happened in the art market that looked, to my untrained eye, like the same phenomenon. Prices of 'modern' art (which may be objectively defined!) declined much more sharply than prices of, for example, Renaissance art. Oddly, I never once heard this called a flight to quality.

I followed both discussions in the Financial Times, which should be able to commoditise art as ruthlessly as anything else it discusses. So my question is this: Why are we so afraid to issue judgements on art? Either one can arrive at objective judgements, or one cannot, in which case the market at least reflects the aggregate viewpoint of our society.

Why can't we see the collapse in the market for modern art as a collective judgement by our civilisation, that much of it is of poor quality?