I'm giving you an up vote as I think your opinion deserves to be heard...
However, I think you are wrong and haven't justified your point.
When I look at the work of someone like Gregory Crewdson[1] who has an idea, builds a set, lights a set, posses models and then processes multiple negatives into a final finished image, I see something.
I think it's art because it's a deliberate, complex thing. I see no purpose in it other than to be pleasing. I don't know where his vison comes from but it's much copied but, to my mind, so far not equalled.
Which is a long way round to saying, I like it. :P
If David Lynch films are art then Gergory Crewdson photographs are the same kind of art.
1. He actually uses a whole team to make his images but I'll just talk about him to save on confusion.
It isn’t really much of a discussion if low effort contrarianness doesn’t have a chance to surface thoughtful disagreements which otherwise get buried in more combative threads. The comment itself might not have taken much effort, but it can easily spawn a more interesting discussion by being so bare of nuance.
Good! Now the less quick trick is finding a way to affect discussion not just prompt it. It’s very similar but requires a lot more anticipation of other people’s emotional state.
Sure great points. But in my view, it remains just that, a photograph. A photograph can be deliberate, complex, and evoke many emotions. It can be pleasing, utterly horrific, or anything in between.
But when I take art classes, I'm not taking photos. I do that in photography class. So as a matter of definition, a photo for me qualifies not as art.
Yeah, I mean, that pretty much sums it up. Of course, you're free to think differently. I think that's pretty fair. You don't tell me what's art, and neither I, you.
Does your art class perhaps only cover “fine art”? Or does it also include the performing arts like music, theatre, even cinema? In my experience in the UK, “art” in school commonly only means fine art, and other forms of art are different enough that they’re broken out into other “subjects”.
Yeah I think that's pretty fair. Music, theatre, cinema are performing arts. Not art. You qualify it with "performing".
And that's my point really. It's a distinction based on definition. Collectively, institutions recognize this and inherently add qualifiers to distinguish between these varying disciplines.
So am I right in understanding you aren’t saying photography isn’t “an art”; just that it isn’t “fine art”? In which case I think you’d see much less disagreement here.
Who are you agreeing with? This is certainly not what the article states.
A closer summary would be (selectively quoting from TFA):
> Photography is not objective truth. Photography and painting both result from deliberate choices of depiction, and there is no clear dividing line between them.
> [...] I argue that pictures are like stories that people tell with pictures. In short, perception is interpretation, and visual art is a construction made for perception.
That's consistent with my claim that I "agree, photography is not art". Feel free believe to the contrary.
Also, my original post takes no stance on the objective reality of the universe and the cosmos as experienced by the finite existence of the mind and self, inherent in the physical limitations imposed upon our feeble bodies by our finite sensory organs.
Kind of. I like to quantify a certain threshold of skill and effort before I qualify something as art. For instance, a 4 year old drawing scribbles, I would consider art. There was skill, however minimal involved. It might not be very good, and a photo that you take would certainly be more aesthetically appealing, but one required deliberate craft to create and bring to reality.
I simply find it distasteful to call something created with the click of a button art. Yes it can be beautiful, yes it can capture the highs and lows of humanity. And yes it can be thought provoking, represent artistic intention, years of learning lighting, composition, framing, etc, etc, etc. But at the end, I'd call it a photo, not art.
If photography can be made with the click of a button, drawing can be made with the flick of a pencil. Good photography, like good drawing, does require both effort and skill—usually, if not always, quite a lot more than that of a toddler drawing scribbles.
In fact, a single photograph may require a great deal of time and careful planning to execute (perhaps with a series of concept sketches, lighting plans, and so on to work out the compositional and logistical details).
That's great. And yeah you're right, a drawing with a flick of the pencil probably sucks. But it's still a drawing. It took some level of effort - the less effort, the more it sucks. But in the end, I make art.
For a photo, there might have been effort, but it was taken with a camera. I don't take art using a camera. I take photos.
Ie: I go into Minecraft and build something. That's art. vs. I go into Minecraft and take a photo of something that someone else made. That's a screenshot.
Well, I was responding to your argument that photos are not art because art requires skill and effort. It sounds like you are conceding my point that some photographs take more skill and effort than some drawings that you would consider art—so based on that it seems we are on the same page that your "skill and effort" criterion, by itself, doesn't seem to be able to tell us what is and isn't art.
At this point it sounds like you are simply asserting, without providing an argument, that your position is correct. But I am unclear on what exactly your claim is: is it that (1) no photography is art or that (2) the photographs that you yourself take, as a rule, tend not to be art?
Sure, I can make it more clear. Yes, you're right, it's not just about skill and effort. But I am claiming that for me, no photography is art. I concede that it can be artistic, but not art.
I have seen some people make beautiful screenshots of games in artificially created environments where basically the only reason for the existence of the feature is to make screenshots. Oh and by the way, they were all screenshots of something the game developers made.
Stop motion animation can't be art either because it is just a chain of photos of objects someone else made.
They can be great screenshots, no doubt! Stop motion animation can be great too. I've heard great things about Isle of Dogs, and other stop motion movies from studio Laika. And yeah, they can certainly be artistic.
People who believe that "art = figurative painting" think that anything else isn't art.
In reality all painting is distorted, abstracted, and stylised. That's what makes it interesting.
So when people believe this, it just means they aren't aware that all painting is abstracted.
Even if you change nothing else, composing something inside a frame requires creative choices.
And the point of both painting and photography is to manipulate composition, colour, tone, use of lighting, choice of subject, pose, narrative, and so on, to create an experience for the viewer.
There's also those who believe art requires skill, talent and/or craft. There are photographers who believe that Adams is art because of these factors and down play the 'decisive moment' photographers. There are painters who say that only highly realistic portraits are "art".
In Art School we had a big debate whether a random 4x6 photograph pulled from their parent's photo drawer was 'art'. What we came to agree was, that if someone put that photo into a gallery and framed it, it would be perceived as art. Figuring out what changed, it was the inferred semiotic sign that an artist has bestowed on the object that changed it into art.
Yes, I think though in your matrix where an Artist has intended a thing to be art, but its not perceived to be it, is mostly a form of communication breakdown. An artist has tried to send a signal, but it hasn't been received. A famous artist may decide to leave a can of soda on a picnic table in a park. You observe it, not knowing who placed it, and it looks like litter. Later, you see a photo that the artist took, with a statement about their artistic intent. You now will see that object in your mind as an art piece to be considered, it might not just be considered well. Certainly every artistic statement does not require appreciation from the public as a quality statement, anyone who's gone through art school knows that.
However, it most likely is the case that if an Artist intends something to be art, and no-one perceives it as such, its not 'good art'.
It occurred to me that in the case where someone created a thing and didn't intend to create art, but you received it as art, that is indeed art. Was the famous urinal 'art' to Duchamp, before Duchamp exhibited it as 'art'?
You may have misinterpreted certain aspects of my blog post. If someone created something that they didn't intend as art, no matter what my reception is, it's not art. So before Duchamp exhibited it as art, it is certainly not art.
My point is, Duchamp saw it as art, where the creator of the thing did not. So what was the matrix like for Duchamp? I argue he saw something was art, that was not created to be it.
Ah okay apologies, thought Duchamp made it. But yeah, I'd agree with you, they saw something as art that was not created to be. So they're just wrong.
It's like if someone couldn't find a toilet so they just took a dump on a display toilet at Home Depot. Someone comes along and calls it art. They're wrong. That's just fecal matter.
Per "Graham's hierarchy of disagreement" this is contradiction without evidence - the midpoint between three good and three bad forms of disagreement. I think HN could formally forbid the bottom 4 forms, for they don't anything to discussion.
