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#21
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Is photography art?
Yes, but I am fond of annoying my musical friends by saying that music
includes 4 things......Beat, Words, Harmony, and Melody... Words are not needed at all. And rap has three of them: Beat, words and melody, Some one else's prerecorded music that they just talk over, not even sing over. Rap people are nothing more than disc jockeys that talk over the whole song, not just the intro. But modern jazz only has two: Beat, and harmony.... And Melody? So which is more like music? (I am obviously not a lover of modern jazz....) What is "modern" jazz? Do you mean "new age" music? I like Jazz, but I am not a big fan of New Age. |
#22
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Is photography art?
jjs wrote: Citing the Encyclopedia or Dictionary is the last resort of a desperado. ....saying such as the above is a common retort of the fellow who's view is being contested. |
#23
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Is photography art?
If you keep pounding the word "art" into some sort of shapeless mush such
that it no longer has any meaning, what word will you invent to mean what "art" used to mean? Yes. Just like the words "bandwidth" "troll" and "spam" are not used properly, so has the word "art" been stolen and is now being used incorrectly by most of society. Instead of us having to come up with a new word for what "art" used to mean, people should come up with new unused words to describe their new definitions. But in most cases, what people are calling art today already have words to describe what they REALLY are.... Photographs, etc. Or are you so insensible to the concept of real art that you just don't think it's important to have a word for it? "Art" by itself means "real art". Then they put words in front of it, like "modern art" to describe children's paintings or paintings that require only a child's abilities to paint. As people got more lazy and less talented, even "modern art" required more talent and ability than what the next generation of self proclaimed "artists" could do, so was called "contemporary art" as to not get confused with the much more talented "modern art" which consists of nothing more than gluing some garbage together and spray painting it. What will the next generation of talent less art be called when a new word needs to describe it as to not insult the slightly more talented "contemporary artists"? "fool's art"? "citizen art"? "photography"? |
#24
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Is photography art?
How about the talented artist that abandons his talent and produces junk
just to make lots of money.....(Picasso is a good example) Picasso was talented? Picasso was an artist? This is debatable. Is everything that he/she produces art? Is anything he produces art? Does a capable artist produce art always? No, sometimes he takes photographs. Again, is the process important, or just the end result? What is important is that the art produced looks as realistic as possible and is made or painted by hand and contains talent that most people do not have. The fewer people that can duplicate or create it, the more it qualifies as art. Not many can paint the Mona Lisa. Anyone can take a photograph. |
#25
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Is photography art?
NJH wrote: "Russ Holister" wrote in message ... No. The camera is doing that. The photographer is the operator of the machine. Absent the machine, very few photographers ever "create an image on film." (It has been done, but not very often.) The camera, camera's controls, choice of film and lighting are some of the *tools* which provide control over the variables which result in an image. Therefore, if those controls are being manipulated by a photographer, it is the photographer that determines what that image will be. The operator of a one-hour photo processor may also "manipulate controls" that "determine what that image will be" just as much as the controls manipulated by the photographer. Does that make that operator an "artist"? BRAVO!! Great point! Why doesn't the photo processor get the credit for making the art? He is the one who puts the image on paper! What a great way to end a most silly debate that actually entertained the idea that a photographer is anything at all like an artist. Thank you very much. I've been feeling sort of outnumbered here. ;-) Neil Keep in mind that you are on a photography newsgroup, so of course most people here are going to want to believe that what they do is art. If you were to bring the same discussion to an art newsgroup, you would have much more support. This would be like going to a newsgroup called alt.photo.minolta.fanatics and having a debate on which cameras were the best. If you said anything other than minolta, you would be outnumbered, but that doesn't mean that minolta is the best camera, it just means you are on a newsgroup with a concentrated group of biased individuals. Of course MOST of the people on a photography newsgroup are going to argue that photography is art. But if you went to a newsgroup of real artists, then they would all laugh at you if you suggested photographers were artists. |
#26
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Is photography art?
jjs wrote:
Citing the Encyclopedia or Dictionary is the last resort of a desperado. What a ridiculous statement. Obviously someone just proved you wrong by looking up a definition to a word for you to make such a statement. ...saying such as the above is a common retort of the fellow who's view is being contested. Obviously. |
#27
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Is photography art?
"Pete Black" wrote in message ... How about the talented artist that abandons his talent and produces junk just to make lots of money.....(Picasso is a good example) Picasso was talented? Picasso was an artist? This is debatable. Actually Picasso was a very fine artist before he started doing that goofy stuff, people with their parts on the wrong side and so on. Since it was the latter stuff that brought him fame and fortune, he abandoned representational art and never looked back. That doesn't tell us much about art, but it sure tells us a lot about nonsense "art" and marketing. Is everything that he/she produces art? Is anything he produces art? Does a capable artist produce art always? No, sometimes he takes photographs. Again, is the process important, or just the end result? What is important is that the art produced looks as realistic as possible and is made or painted by hand and contains talent that most people do not have. The fewer people that can duplicate or create it, the more it qualifies as art. Not many can paint the Mona Lisa. Anyone can take a photograph. Absolutely. Art calls for skill, talent and WORK, which is what many of these shutter release-pushing "artists" can't seem to understand. Neil |
#28
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Is photography art?
"NJH" wrote in
: "Pete Black" wrote in message ... How about the talented artist that abandons his talent and produces junk just to make lots of money.....(Picasso is a good example) Picasso was talented? Picasso was an artist? This is debatable. Actually Picasso was a very fine artist before he started doing that goofy stuff, people with their parts on the wrong side and so on. Since it was the latter stuff that brought him fame and fortune, he abandoned representational art and never looked back. That doesn't tell us much about art, but it sure tells us a lot about nonsense "art" and marketing. I suspect that photography is the main culprit in killing off representational art, especially photorealistic art. Why hire a highly trained artist when for a tiny fraction of the cost you can have a photograph made? This is not to say that there's nothing to art but the painting of a realistic imaga; but that aspect is what paid the bills. People hired artists to do (for example) portraits, i.e., representations. Artists had to turn to other things once photography marginalized them as highly skilled makers of realistic images. They needed to differentiate themselves from photography, to get away from head-to-head competition with photography, in order simply to survive economically. (That's my guess, anyway.) |
#29
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Is photography art?
"Constantinople" wrote in message ... "NJH" wrote in m: "Art photography" makes pretensions to being a fine art and to some degree is accepted as such, which makes its categorization more difficult. But Westons and Adamses will never be regarded as Rembrandts and Michelangelos, and will never even come close. I avoid the use of the art/not art categorization and I don't find the concept of "fine" art to help matters, but I would agree with you on this point: that Rembrandt and Michelangelo achieved more, and are justly more famous. And the reason a photographer doing straight photography like Ansel Adams, even with great craft and care (the zone system), cannot achieve as much, is that they do not have the same degree of control over their medium - specifically, the point-by-point control exercised by a painter with his brush and a sculptor with his chisel. At the same time, this very limitation is what makes photography worthwhile. Not because it lets us be lazy. But because a photograph is a mechanical reproduction rather than a point-by-point-painted (or chiselled) work. Its mechanization is what limits the photographer's control. (The photographer can, of course, choose to exercise point by point control, but the more control he exercises the less we can trust the image as "a photograph".) This same mechanization is what makes the image "a photograph", and we value photographs over paintings in certain contexts, because their mechanization makes them a more direct, unfiltered impression of reality. History, at least in my own mind, is divided into two periods: those times before photography, and those times after photography. We in a sense can really see how things were in any period that had photography; but we can only infer, from paintings, how things were in pre-photographic times. I have in a sense looked upon Lincoln with my own eyes, because I saw his photograph; but I have never seen Washington, because I have seen only painted impressions of him. Yes, I agree with you completely. To some degree that is true even after photography. I'm a World War I history buff, especially with respect to aviation. I have many, many published photographs from that period and also many published paintings. Unfortunately few of the photographs have stood the years very well. Most of them are not very sharp and are seriously lacking in tonal gradation and sharpness. One simply cannot see all the details he would like to see. The paintings on the other hand are still magnificent, those done contemporaneously as well as more recent works. But who can say how realistic they are? We see, for example, pilots looking over their shoulders as they circle each other in a Fokker D.VII and an SPAD XIII. The fighters are pristine looking, all the details sharp, all the colors and markings correct and "accurate," but would they actually have looked that way in combat? Comparing with the poor B&W photos available it's impossible to tell what the planes really looked like in color. The paintings LOOK realistic to people today who think they know (based on old photos and general knowledge of the aircraft) what they would have looked like. As far as details are concerned, the paintings are more "informative" than the old poor photos. But we just don't know whether the added "information" is correct. The photos may be less satisfying but (with the exception of a few well-known fakes) we can rely on what information they do supply, however incomplete. Neil |
#30
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Is photography art?
"William Graham" wrote in message news:nhKdb.624579$uu5.100533@sccrnsc04... NJH wrote in message m... "William Graham" wrote in message news:Ocndb.600021$YN5.443639@sccrnsc01... [ . . . ] on a map) And there are many other examples of projects/disciplines that take years and years of practice and study to learn. Can you quantify the difficulty of the medium that is required before you are willing to give it the distinction of, "a fine art"? The fine arts as far as I'm concerned are pretty much limited to the traditional ones: painting, drawing, sculpture and related procedures as far as image-producing stuff is concerned. Cinematography can surely be an art, and a very important one, but I can't see it as a fine art. "Art photography" makes pretensions to being a fine art and to some degree is accepted as such, which makes its categorization more difficult. But Westons and Adamses will never be regarded as Rembrandts and Michelangelos, and will never even come close. Other photos, including lovely images of sunsets, pretty flowers, etc. that are sometimes presented as "art" by the people who took them, are not art, fine or otherwise. Neil Well, then. at best, you have to admit that the definition is, "fuzzy"...... There are several definitions for "art," as with most words in the English language. Some of them require that the definition be somewhat "fuzzy." That does not mean that the definitions can be discarded. In the field of politics for example, do you suppose "liberal" means exactly the same thing to all people? Or "conservative"? Those terms are defined, but what they mean EXACTLY, in detail, depends to some extent on one's political position and viewpoint. Some words are less likely to be argued over. We discussed frying eggs before. It is unlikely we'd ever get into an argument over what "frying eggs" means. ;-) As a mathematician (my degree) I tend to think in absolutes....I don't like fuzzy definitions, although I have to admit that they exist....But I always try to bring any discussion to its obvious extremes.....Sort of, (in mathematical terms) investigate the end points, or inflections of the equation.....I instinctively reject the idea that there are only five fine arts, for example...... Those five make up what are called "the fine arts." In this usage "fine" does not mean "better than any other kind of art" necessarily (though they do generally have that sort of stature), it is just used to distinguish those five arts from all other kinds. I think that the neurosurgeon that you mentioned above, will sometimes create wonderful artistic work inside of the heads of some of his patients..... One hopes he does good work, but it isn't art. Millions of people do very good work that isn't art. It's just a pity that we can't see it, or know about it, because we weren't there to see it done, and/or haven't got the capacity to understand it if we were......I guess what I am trying to say is that the world is too complex a place to be able to pin the definition of "fine art" on only 5 or 6 disciplines...... The definition is what it is. It may be expanded to include something else at another time; who knows? Neil |
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