WHAT’S INTERESTING about Cecily Brown is how from the very start her work gets positioned as a way to talk about what’s good or bad in painting. Her painting is good in a way that looks like it’s supposed to be good, that plays with a certain idea of “goodness.” But it also courts the bad. Not just the bad, the horrible. I’ve heard vitriolic takedowns of her technique and her mannerisms; someone once described her painterly facture, her surfaces, as “coleslaw.” “She manages to make the most expensive oil paints look like cheapest acrylic,” someone once wrote (not me). Now that’s a queeny, bitchy, funny thing to say, but it’s just not true. If anything, one comes away from a Brown show with an all too vivid sense of how much money must’ve been spent on the paint.