On Fri, February 5, 2010 01:23, Andrew Sharpe wrote: > Hmm. It's an interesting proposition. But I don't think that the order > of execution necessarily divides art and craft. Art is quite often > (usually?) based on the direct experiences or the artist; things they > have seen, heard, felt, etc., including others' work, perhaps using the > same subjects that they are using in their own work. And craftsmen often conceive pretty thoroughly what they're going to do before they lay hand to tools. > And how does this proposition work for photographers, that, by > definition, are quite often capturing an image of something that has > already previously been photographed? Can a photograph of a plant never > be considered a work of art because there have already been 40 million > (just an estimate :)) other pictures of plants? Can photography then > never be art? A number of portraits are considered parts of the artistic canon, even though they're just fairly straightforward portraits. "Newness" is a recent expectation of art, probably caused by people being able to see more and more of it and starting to become jaded. Probably. And I don't think it has done very well by art; many of the new directions exalted by insiders have never spoken to a wider audience (though some have, too). > I don't have the answer, but I do believe that a photograph can be just > as much art as Picasso's "The Old Guitarist", or Dali's "The Persistence > of Vision". I'm pretty sure we're working with largely undefined terms, that people have different internal models of. Makes it hard to really get anywhere. And the distinction between "not art" and "bad art" often derails such discussions. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
