The Art Credit

Before I get too snarky, I want to go on record on the subject of Tracey Emin's tipsy, love-lorn public persona. It's just what the art world needs. Her drawings, by contrast, are deplorable—so bad that they require me to introduce the eminently snarky concept of the art credit.
It's like a handicap in golf or the spread that evens up the betting on a football game between mismatched teams. Let's say that it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that Team A is going to steamroller Team B. Your bookie might say, Take B and seven points. Or fifteen. It depends on just how lousy Team B is, in comparison to Team A. You take Team B and fifteen points, Team A wins the game by fourteen points, and you win the bet.
So, how many points do we have to give Tracey Emin to keep her in the game with, oh, er, I don't know—Michelangelo? Those of you who saw her show at Lehman-Maupin know that her scratchy, unmuscular drawings make Josef Beuys look like Michelangelo. So, what's the spread? A hundred points? A thousand? Is it even calculable?
What bookies call the spread I call the art credit, because it's the special allowance that certain artists are granted simply by virtue of having established themselves as artists. The beneficiary of a sizable art credit, Emin has no reason to learn to draw—any more than John Currin has any need to become a better painter. Positioned as a major artist, Currin enjoys an art credit big enough to get him compared to Renaissance masters, even though he works at the level of old-time illustrators like N. C. Wyeth. Not that Currin's art credit is as big as Emin's. It doesn't have to be. There is, after all, something verging on art in his work.