Is photography art?

jjs wrote in message
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"Raymond Kasprzak" wrote in message
...

You can debate this topic forever but the Encyclopedia Brittanica does
consider photography an art. Here is the link:
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article...&query=art&ct=

Citing the Encyclopedia or Dictionary is the last resort of a desperado.


Yeah....What do they know? - I've got Google........

NJH wrote in message
...

"William Graham" wrote in message
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NJH wrote in message
m...

"William Graham" wrote in message
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[ . . . ]

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


Again, I sense that the work of the neurosurgeon isn't art to you because it
has a useful purpose other than just the amusement of the observer. You
believe that fine art can't have any practical value.

My Uncle just got his portrait painted (in oils), or so he thought. In
fact, the portrait is a digital photo portrait, modified to take a few years
off his appearance in PhotoShop, then run thru some "oil painting" software
to give it the appearance of small blotches of oils paints in discrete
tones, and then ink jet printed on a textured surface that looks like a
canvas. You can buy the software and materials at Staples. I guess this
was a bit more elaborate due to size - it must have required a big ink jet
printer and big "canvas."

In fact, it's a very good portrait. At first glance (and maybe second too)
you'd say this was an oil painting. On closer inspection, you'd wonder why
the painter duplicated every thread in his jacket insted of "suggesting"
them. Then you might notice that there is a complete absence of brush marks
and no paint layers on the durface of the canvas. But beyond that, it looks
exactly like an oil painting.

Is it Art, or is it mechanical imaging?

"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.

[...]
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.

Of course, Pete is baiting the thread. Picasso could paint realistically. He
chose to transcend the so-called natural representation of things to
introduce human inspired renderings: _ideas_. Many will recall that there
was in society an emerging change of perspective from a classic physical
representation of things, time, ideas to a new form - from physics to art.
Picasso knew this and made an advantage of it.

"NJH" wrote in message
...

"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.

And 'art' was the evincing of a sweeping social change in areas other than
visual arts, for example physics finally embracing a non-newtonian view and
also changes in historiography. Making 'art' of the visual representation
of ideas that were beyond the touch of the average person was the making of
a bridge. That's one of the ways 'art' emerges, is vailidated. Picasso and
many others knew this form of discourse and painted certain terms of it. A
lot of people resent Picasso so much because he seemed to have the most fun
of it and he shunned verbal rationalizations.

"Constantinople" wrote in message
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"NJH" wrote in
:

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.)

And it worthwhile noting that in the prephotographic eras, common people
often employed portrait artists who traveled about making realistic
renderings. As many of these 'artists' were considered craftsmen as
photographers today are considered the same. Things really have not changed
much.

"NJH" wrote in message
...

Now that I think about it, I'm not aware of any non-representational
school
of painting that existed before photography.

Strictly speaking, there were no "schools" of non-representational art
before photography, but there were cultures of nonrepresentational art -
that is cultural niches which made no attempt to be photo-real. (You see, we
are now defining "school" as a social movement - relating to what I said
earlier that society/markeplace/history determine what 'art' is.)
Photography did put the nail in the coffin of pure realism but it did _not_
remove pictoralism which is the interpretation using 'hand arts' of what we
call photorealism.

"William Graham" wrote in message
news:_n4eb.639402$uu5.102457@sccrnsc04...
Oh yes....Picasso was a wonderful painter....I suggest that you look at
some
of his early work. When he was 18 he painted a scene of a sick old man in
bed being attended to by a couple of nurses....A fantastic
painting....Picasso could paint brilliantly....He just turned out crap
later
in life to make money, and (I suspect) to laugh at the art lovers for whom
he had little or no respect.....

Show is evidence of his lack of respect.

"William Graham" wrote in message
news:4e4eb.639368$uu5.102247@sccrnsc04...

[...] If one
were to hold ones hands over ones ears for the first and last 16 bars, all
the "runs" would sound the same, and one wouldn't be able to recognize
what
they were playing. This kind of music is the ultimate crap to me, and it
is
why I claim that, "Modern Jazz" has no melody. Just making it up as you go
along is not a melody to me, [...]

You sound like J.S. Bach who complained about those who play at the keyboard
instead of following mathematical or rigid metrics. That's perfectly fine,
but the so-called 'modern' (avant garde) jazz was, and is, a legitimate and
powerful thing - those people are conversing in music you simply don't like
or don't understand.

"Pete Black" wrote in message
...
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.

Art is dynamic. It moves in time. It cannot be stamped, frozen in a few
words. He who finds great solace in the dictionary is one easily pleased,
and quite likely one who will not grow.