As I mentioned a day or two ago, I'm currently enthralled by Art Photography Today, a compendium of the best and brightest contemporary photographers today.
Despite the one glaring omission in the photographers it covers ;-)
the book is chock full of opinions and insight.
Today, the phrase that's churning in my mind is this:
"The digital revolution has impacted in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago, causing some to ask not 'Is this art?" but 'Is this photography?'"
Now I'm not totally blameless in this, in that I've had some passionate rants of my own about wanna-bes bastardizing the art form by calling any old ink jet print a "giclee".
On the other hands, it's so silly to categorize the resultant art artifact (the painting, drawing, sculpture, video, photo, etc. resulting from an artist's practicing his or her art) purely on the basis of the tools that were used to create it.
Is one watercolor less a "work of art" than another because a different sized brush was used to create it? Is finger painting "painting"? Is a Holga camera a piece of photographic equipment or merely a toy? In the end, does it really matter?
Instead, qualities like intent, creative vision, technical execution, originality, and inspiration -- all nebulous terms, to be sure -- should be used to more accurately determine the quality of the artistic process (and the resultant artifacts).
In future posts, I'll address this a little more, exploring both unconventional ideas and old chestnuts like
"If a computer were programmed with every 'good' piece of art ever created, and asked to generate new works based on a mathematical formula derived from these masterpieces, would the end result be 'art'?"
Stay tuned!
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