from Dan:
quoted in full for it's worth it.
And here I must re-enter the lists, as I have never been convinced, despite
what some are seem to be saying, that photography is ever "ART".
Art, for me, is e.g. drawing or painting with real paint, whether oil,
gouache, egg-tempera, or whatever; or hacking out the "Three Graces" from a
huge lump of marble.
Photography is something different - as someone has, more or less, said -
any fool with a phone these days can take an award winning photo., if
happily in the right place at the right time. To the great majority out
away from our cloistered world photography is just happy snaps, records of
visits, sometimes evidence - but rarely "ART" - very few will have an Ansel
Adams print on their walls, and even fewer would ever consider photography
arty enough to pay the enormous sums demanded for an A.A. original print.
Guiness beer is marketed on it's nitrogen bubbles being finer than CO2
bubbles, however given the (lacvk of ) solubility of nitrogen, it's 100%
down to marketting, Nitrogen merely supplies the pressure.
I'll wade in again with my tired old argument regarding Art - the word
stemming from the latin ars, meaning skill, th connotation of beauty is
implied, much as the word propaganda implies misinformation - neither are
correct.
An artist was a man (wifman or wereman) who knew the art of doing something
and made better things than the unskilled person. The stealth could steal
better than the common thief (stealth, the art of stealing) A painter did a
better job than the average joe, a sculptor, armed with the techniques
(craft, skill, art) could knock out a better pot than I could. Of course
the weaver was always held in higher regard than a painter, musician or
sketch artist who were after all, mere laborors.
It wasn't simply a matter of profession, many an artist did their deeds at
times other than when they earned their shekels raking muck. Some preferred
it this way, reserving their skill for love whilst the mundane was proivided
for in more mundane ways.. however the elevation of the truly skilled was a
thing out of their hands
The old High arts impress me - they involved the mind. Music, arithmatic,
geometry, astronomy and the philosophies - with grammar logic and rhetoric
coming first naturally.. while practical arts such as medicine, engineering,
architecture were not held in quite the same regard.
Things change over the years and these all got jumbled up a bit with some
of the essentials being dropped altogether as they were too hard for the
masses, and then there were new words created and thrown into the mix.
'Scientist' was one - a special type of philosopher who adopted the
necessity of falsifiability as a precursor to assimilation (if ye can't
disprove it, it ain't science!) Closer to the topic at hand another word,
artisan, muddled the puddle, probably French, it seemed to be used as a
method of disassociating certain skilled people of low notoriety from those
with more sway. Artiste is another. I can almost here the word being
used capitalized in speech by an indignant fop with a beret permanently
attached to their head when referring to them self in the third person.
I guess if I were aspiring to make a blurry image of my
parrot/puppy/pe(nether regions) in hyperchromatic tones ,and I crafted the
image carefully and it met my intent, I could consider my skills applied and
my work done - it's still not 'art' .. it's merely a picture, much as logic
provides the argument, math provides the equation, and the potter provides
the pot.
the art remains in the hands and mind of their creator
- hugs
karl
