[Felinik]

Print quality? Nobody sees that or cares, besides perhaps other photographers/printers. In that context, from a marketing perspective, it might be easier to sell photographs that are blurry or grainy or under/overexposed because they are further removed from what the public would normally view as simple photographs. Potential buyers may see them as more than just pictures, and perhaps have a sense of the work the artist put in. A blurry or very grainy print might give the impression the photographer made the picture rather than simply took the picture.

This does indeed sound like part of the truth. It's kind of like with music, as soon as an artist release a song where something is completely bananas, vocals that sounds like frogs or robots or some other odd species, banjo playing backwards, or something else that is "out of the norm", if the artist is well known enough, it's treated as a stroke of genius and hits the charts with full power...

So again "a la mode"...