Time to give up on cool?

An amusing story from artsjournal.com today attempts to gauge the over-valuation of cool. It comes from the Times online and author Grayson Perry; an excerpt:

Few groups can be more conservative than teenagers who take coolness seriously: they pounce on difference; goodness is boiled down to the lowest common denominator of “correct” brands, bands and overwrought hair. What makes cool an immature value system is its simple hip/square, in/out, mingin’/blingin’ binary, while being adult is dealing with shades of grey and with compromise. With luck, as we mature we can trust our judgment about what feels good or bad. We can cast aside the crutches of cool.

This quote appears in the context of an article about how often the author hears artists described as cool when they are often wierdos with off beat obsessions that no one appreciates or understands. Until, that is, a mediating institution (gallery, museum, critic, publisher) steps in and transforms the outrageous into the exceptional, and now it's cool.
When I began to be active as a critic and curator, I would go to artists' studios and have mild panic attacks. Nothing looked finished, nothing looked real to me. I quickly realized that I had been brought up on museums and galleries, and that I had a pretty undeveloped digestive system for the kind of unprocessed art that one sees in a studio. I was sort of used to eating baby food and art in studios was too rich, too textured, too complicated for my senses, which were used to visual-Velveeta.
Since then I've learned that art is, in fact, truly un-cool. It gets made into cool by a number of forces and, increasingly, that makes it less interesting to me. I think of Macolm Gladwell's influential article, The Coolhunt and how things are less interesting when they have caught on, and how it's when they catch on that they become cool.
All this is to say that I think making a cohesive body of work, that aiming for the gallery, that looking at what one student referred to as "great art" in a recent e-mail (troubling quoting a faculty member), may be the wrong move. An artist friend of mine uses as his highest form of praise for a work the description that it looks "store-bought" as opposed to home-made. For me? Forget about the store. Show me the factory.