A photographic imagination

A social rite, a defense agianst anxiety, and a tool of power

2006-04-15T11:04:00.000-04:00

I am rereading Sontag's On Photography and thought it quite on the mark for something written 27 years before Flickr and in light of the questions posed on the Utata group on Flickr.

It struck me as a way of framing the essence of some of the responses here in this thread. " ... photography has become as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing -- which means that, like every mass art form, photogrpaphy is not practiced by most people as an art. It is a mainly a social rite, a defense agianst anxiety, and a tool of power."

What do you think?

Multiples of one

2006-04-11T16:38:00.000-04:00

From PDN (subscription required) :
Smaller Editions, Large Prints, High Prices

"Today, editioning remains the cornerstone of photo pricing. But never before have the price tags on photographs been so high, and the edition numbers so dramatically low. Instead of issuing editions of 50 or 25, photographers and their galleries today are routinely limiting their editions to ten, five or even three prints for a single image.

Photography dealers themselves point to a couple of causes for this pervasive trend. The most valuable commodity on the art market today is painting. Collectors interested in art as an investment are more comfortable buying one-of-a-kind paintings than photographic prints, which can be endlessly multiplied. Not only do smaller editions mimic the scarcity of a painting, but art photography today is being printed in super-large formats on the scale of paintings.

Then there are the living photographers—maybe a dozen prominent examples—who have successfully resisted the market pressure to edition their work. Some are fashion or commercial photographers who just can't be bothered; others are photojournalists who are philosophically opposed to the notion, as their very mission is to communicate the horrors of war, famine, or social injustice to as many people as possible."

I think I will burn my work prints and in the future only ever make 7 prints from now on. How about you?

Shoot 'em, bleed 'em, then skin 'em

2006-04-09T10:27:00.000-04:00

From the NY Times a lesson about how to package or repackage what is no better than the average Flickr photo (from the images shown) into something that resonates.

What is interesting to me is that photograhy is so elastic that even when in this case average and in the service of marketed nostalgia and oral history it absorbs and projetcs the sentimentality and historical as gravitas.

What do you think?

"Real Fantasies" and the realities of the photographic market

2006-03-18T19:50:00.000-05:00

"Real Fantasies" New Photography from Switzerland

Today, more than ever before, photography is a hybrid, a composite that mixes documentary and fiction, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary, analog and digital, visual pleasure with iconoclasm. As such, it reflects the fragmentation of personal experience, the dislocation of our world view and the loss of our sense of self. Found photography, banal photography, manipulated photography, photo-romans, staged photography, morphed photography, resilient documentary photography - this visual medium still has - despite the fact that the art market is now turning away from it - a boundless ability to question, analyse and reflect the world around us. Needless to say, the availability of so many different photographic approaches grants enormous freedom, but with it there must also be a structural awareness of the medium itself and of its context in the media in general, for only in the friction generated between application and reflection can true visual greatness, density and complexity be achieved.

On exhibiting

2006-02-23T06:18:00.000-05:00

Recently on Flickr, I answered a few questions about my (limited) expierence exhibiting. I thought I 'd share them here.

What you've felt you've gotten from the experience?

There are over 100 million images on Flickr and now maybe the same amount on Fotolog. There are a good portion of the people who do quite a bit of selective viewing. That's the way that people use the web. These sites are important for me as they present an audience and that has increased the definition about the images I make - that's a good thing. Running with this audience since 2003 prepared me for 2005 as I had the good fortune to be selected to show in 5 exhibits, 4 group shows and 1 solo show. I also did two open studio events in connection with one exhibit. For 4 of the 5, I was able to participate at the gallery, meet the audience and spent time with Flickr and Fotolog friends that dropped by. Many of those I got to meet in person for the first time.

In the middle of the first opening, in midst of the other artists, collectors and varied guests I began to realize that this creative life, this adventure has a dynamic all its own. As creators we control one part of it very tightly while drifting in something akin to the East River in NY with no natural currents of its own and a strong undertow. You are at the mercy of what comes next. These are ealy days for me but to be sure, the clarity of value of the artist and audience to each other could not have come soon enough. That's empowering to me as I look into the audience and see myself and they look back to my work and see themselves. And it is complicated I think because over time the artist and audience changes and that balance could fall apart. Trust the art and not the artist!

Exhibiting is about the audience. These people that come to the gallery invest a lot. It is a personal investment in time and if they buy, in money. There is nothing more personal than the art that people hang on the walls of their home or other personal space. I know how I relate to an image and want to relate to the artist - they leave bits of their DNA on my imagination. It is very intimate and meeting the audience at least for me was a very positive experience. I am certainly not pollyana about this at all - we serve at the will of audience's imagination. It may be my art. But in the gallery it is as much the money business and that is just the way it is. I am fine with that.

Beyond the excitement of the first sale after which it all about keeping score, I found the open studio event humbling. I was able to bring in hundreds of small mostly 5x7 work prints - test prints and people bought them in pairs, sets - explaining how these would be displayed and really getting into much more of the work than six pictures that made up my part of the exhibition. The audience connected. They understood what I did.

Where you found difficulties?

I work digitally - so manufacturing - printing, framing, matting, shipping, return shipping .....

Why you want to show?

I want attention for the work and to build connections and memories in an audience. I think it also combats the indifference, isolation and alienation that comes from working alone on your art day after day.

What you think your work is saying(If there is a general overview you feel your work states)?

I feel that an image that expresses something - an idea, a mood, a feeling, a memory that tries to suggest to viewer not only what concerned or interested me as its creator but the viewer themselves is an image full or meaning and the connection that I think we all hope to make. That is the soul of image making. That is the soul of all art.

Cameras don't shoot photographs, people do

2006-01-29T06:41:00.000-05:00

Recently an Indian filmaker sued NYC for violating his 1st ammendment rights. See SepiaMutiny "Inian guys with cameras".

I shoot on the streets alot and this is how I feel, however conflicted it may be. Please excuse the length of this.

Vigilance is something we should have, and I personally want.
Police can be bullying and their actions need to be accounted for.
Both sides need to test the limits.
With the amount of cameras on the streets of NY and the continued hightened security, the problem will continue to exist.
We need clear rules.

Here is a fuller quote from NYCLU on what they are hoping to accomplish.

NYCLU’s executive director, Donna Lieberman, says Sharma’s arrest and detention violated his civil rights and that the city’s permit policy (which is largely unwritten) violates the U.S. Constitution’s 1st Amendment. "In a democracy, people have the right to document activity in public places without being arrested," she declares in a press release on the organization’s website. "When the city tried to stop people from taking pictures in the subway, we objected and the city backed down. In the same way, we are challenging the city's arbitrary film permitting scheme, which exposes legitimate filmmakers to risk of arrest for taking pictures on the streets of New York."

I am no fan of the CLUs but Ms. Lieberman's comments seem rather pragmatic. A sensible group of rules would benefit everyone. So in this case if the NYCLU could correct the "arbitrary film permitting scheme" that woudl be great. Of course that would mean we'd then have to hope that we would be considered "legitimate filmakers". Then question will be - Does having a Flickr account, blog, or website make you a serious filmaker? Here I am not sure th NYCLU is working for a solution which would be applicable to everyone with a camera.

As far as Mr.Sharma. My own prejudice is the in the world of film and filmakers he must have a bit of the grandstander and promoter in him. This kind of controversy increases buzz and the interest in the project. And of course that doesn't mean the police that day didn't violate his rights. The court will decide that. It just seems as scripted an incident as possible for a documentary on how things have changed for ordinary people since 911. I would hope anyone standing for an extended period of time near an underpass at Grand Central Station shooting video would be checked on. Do I need to say Madrid? And of course this was before the London undergound incidents. His work is political and he is politically savvy enough for me to think he understood this - perhaps even wanted to test this. Maybe this was the point he wanted to make.

Also here is a quote from Sharma. "They asked me to apply for a formal permit to shoot the film and specify the name of the street, corners, buildings and pavements. They also asked me to get an insurance package of $1 million before commencing the shoot." If anyone has had expierences with the City's file permit process, it would be good to get their take. It seems a commercial film would carry insurance and a permit would be issued for where you'd want to shoot. There is a quote above from the NYCLU that describes the permit rules as unwritten and arbitrary, which seems to reflect the confused and random police actions that people often describe.

I work in midtown and there is every kind of person out there with a camera white, black, tan, brown no one seems intimidated to me - and that doesn't even count the millions of camera phones snapping away - not sure there is alot of police action (as a % of photograpgers shooting) on this. NY is dependent on tourists, tourists take pictures, NY makes money. What I sense is that we see enough bad policing of the rules and poor handling of individual incidents to make this a problem. I am not sure that all photographers are saints so I throw in some bad attitude there which fans the flames on some incidents.

I don't know anythng about the Indian film industry and their censor board. You can read an interview with the former board head where he discusses Sharma's film and from my reading (please correct me) it seems his film was cleared by the board as part of their appeal process. I raise that because either his film is banned or isn't. Also in the AP story they indicated this was not his first run in with the police - not sure the NYPD and the Indian film censor board should be lumped together - seems at points more advocacy then reporting. The controversy about Sharma's film seems well documented on the web and I was unable to find any articles making a direct connection between his film showing in India and any violence. Again would like to understand this better.

Again, I am all over the place on this one and probably have more questions than answers.

''Why is this art?

2005-12-15T17:36:00.000-05:00

A post written a while back but I guess I never hit the submit button

A lively debate about the purity of photography at edward_ winkleman with 70 high flying posts about truth and trust - makes me want ask - why would any one trust an "artist" about anything?

Fast forward to the NY Sun's review of MOMA's Pixar show:

But in many ways "Pixar" is both too specialized and too pedestrian. On the one hand, it wants to establish that the computer animation that made the company famous is only part of the story - many of their artists use traditional media. The exhibition also wants to make clear that the computer, like the pencil or brush, is merely a tool - that it is only as good as the illustrator who uses it.

All of this is true enough, but animators are the only ones who really care about the distinction. There is more to "drawing, painting, and sculpture" than illustrative rendering or modelmaking; art is composed of metaphors. The show mistakenly attempts to elevate creative, inventive, and technically adept illustrations and maquettes - cartoon characters rendered for the screen - to that of great drawing and sculpture. What it all amounts to is a purposeful leveling of the playing field: Art is dumbed down and illustration is dumbed up.

Increasingly, artists want to have their tools and eat them, too. MoMA and Pixar want us to believe that the studio's computer-generated illustrations should be considered as art. Yet they feel compelled to remind us that their illustrators work with paint and pastel. It seems to me a bit of overly defensive posturing: Enjoying "Toy Story" doesn't make you a philistine; putting it on a par with Picasso is another story.

And then back track to the NY Times' State of the Art which ends with a flourish:

MANY New Yorkers dismissed ''The Gates,'' or did not take pleasure in it. Some even refused to experience it. Their objections were not to the quality of the work, to the color of the sheets, for instance, or to their height or placement. Technique was never the problem, and few complained that Central Park was being desecrated. Most of the objections went much deeper, reaching in fact to the philosophical issue at the heart of modern art. ''Why is this art?'' the skeptics asked. It's easy to imagine art snobs smirking at what they would consider the cultural naïveté behind such doubts. But the question, a fair and very serious one, has always deserved an answer.
I skipped the Gates and remain dismissive of them. How about you?

Photography at the Tipping Point

2005-12-10T20:05:00.000-05:00

In Canadian Artist, Nancy Tousley's "Photography at the Tipping Point" opens with the following sentence:

"Like painting, photography has been declared dead, but so far there has been no public fuss or outcry about the medium's demise, although the obituary was published nearly fifteen years ago."

And then ends just as strong ...

"For the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, who is sometimes called the philosopher of new media, the invention of photography was the most important cultural invention since linear writing in the second millennium BCE. The photograph, which Flusser theorized as the first technical image, overcame "the artificial separation of culture into science, technology, and art," as Andreas Ströhl, the editor of Flusser's book Writings, explains. In the early 1980s, Flusser proposed that the crux of photography criticism was not the relationship between an object and its representation. "Truth is a relationship between a statement and its meaning," he wrote. "Photography turns the relationship between statement and meaning completely around. The photograph does not discover meanings, but rather, it gives them. It does not matter if they are true or false—even if this could be established. The critical question is, Which meaning does it intend to give according to which criteria? The criterion 'true'—the value 'truth'—is no longer operative in photography and must be abandoned."

Many artists using photography in the early 1980s were abandoning truth in photography in different ways. But whether art photography will ever completely sever its direct connection to the world, and abandon the notion of truth or reality as something to embrace or something to work against, is debatable, although digital imaging is already doing it in the commercial world. In the meantime, at the tipping point, digital imaging has struck up a relationship with both photography and painting. Picture-theory artists and photographers in Düsseldorf and Vancouver have shown that a photograph can be an autonomous object, pure picture. The tipping point is a rich place to be for photography, filled with potential that will be worked out in the evolving practice of artists."

This notion of "true" or "truth" compounded by the velocity and volume of images leads me to one conclusion, biology will sort this out. Science will discover humans can only view a finite number of images before dying or going blind. In recent days I have felt more than half way there. I hope we haven't jumped the shark ....
Note: Just saw this on microblindness in the NY Times Magazine section, we have jumped the shark.

Speed freaks

2005-11-26T10:42:00.000-05:00

Sunday's Washington Post, Blake Gopnik's "Doing Their Own Thing" looks at how some DC area museums are returning to featuring their own permanent collections (duh!).

Art, that is, has become a high-energy, must-see "occasion," like a hot film or a big-time Broadway show. It's part of the entertainment rat race, rather than offering a contemplative experience in contrast to that rush. Museums have got their public hooked on special exhibitions, and now they're stuck having to cater to the speed freaks they've created.

I wonder why some museum doesn't sell off most of it's permanent collection and just become a presenting organization of travelling shows or why a museum isn't started just to be a presenting space. And yes "art" is part of the entertainment rat race and I'll entertainment myself thank you.

Best friends?

2005-11-26T09:36:00.000-05:00

On the Business Standard, Kishore Singh's aticle "Best Friends" examines the relationship between artist, gallerist and the commerce of art:

It’s always been a fractious relationship and one based not so much on a shared love of art as much as avarice and greed. The gallerist and the artist are two ends of a paradigm; they cannot exist without the other but that co-existence is far from cosy.

With few exceptions, gallerists are seen to feed off an artist’s talent, making money (sometimes much more money) than the artist. And since their investment iself isn’t huge to begin with (how much can space, a catalogue, an opening, cost the gallery?), that they’re feeding off the fat of an artist’s labours seems slightly
abhorrent.

It is perhaps this that makes us consider the professional gallerist with something resembling loathing.

We often hear complaints from musical artists about the record labels and filmakers about the studios - it seems as an extension of the entertainment industry "art" follows the same control of distribution model. Of course with a much reduced universe of players, even a small time hustler, uhm I mean gallerist, can make waves.

Where can I get one of these hustlers to move my work?

Hold the presses: Fictions are in!

2005-11-19T18:41:00.000-05:00

An article in Saturday's New York Times by Alan Riding, "Photos That Don't Capture Reality, but Change It" may have officially ushered manipulated photographs to the front of the bus.

Three quotes jump out:

"Most prefer to use color, while many work with large formats, manipulate their images digitally, dabble with collage and design complex mises-en-scènes."

"Indeed, if any common characteristic fits the contemporary photography seen here, it is a concern with form - form that takes on a different meaning when altered digitally and presented in large format."

"Still, whether large or small, documentary or manipulated, most of the works here seem to reflect a conscious effort to alter perceptions. And perhaps that suffices to define art. For those streaming through Paris Photo, the point goes without saying. As the New York dealer Deborah Bell put it, "You judge photography by the same criteria as you judge any work of art." "

Time to call Zeke down at Spectra and update the portfolio.

Poetic reflections on the most alienated aspects of the contemporary human experience

2005-11-13T19:48:00.000-05:00

I have no interest in most movies, I hate being manipulated. I'll entertain myself, thank you (unless the kids want to see them) but this review/article (registration required) in the Washington Post on Jem Cohen has caught my interest.

"in a film that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, personal essay and political polemic, formal rigor and punk rock spontaneity"

I see myself working much of the same although I am probably not so much punk as I used to be back in the day ....

I'm in Hong Kong this week, then back to NY for Thanksgiving before another week in London at the end of the month.

Let truth be the prejudice

2005-11-08T07:05:00.000-05:00

Robert Trippett's article THE VISION THING: Navigating the Slippery Slope of Digital Manipulation With Eyes Wide Shut on Digital Journalist poses 18 question for photojournalists seeking to navigate the "murky line between vision and manipulation".

A photojournalist must carefully measure their intent, both aesthetic and journalistic, making the choices along the way that lead to clarity and not distortion or superficial showmanship. That intent, ethically calibrated, is the fulcrum that begins to resolve some of these thorny dilemmas, counterbalancing the mantra to create something "different" with the more imperative calling to convey what is true.

Now although these questions are posed within the context of a photojournalist's work, it does offer a shopping list to cross examine any purist's dersion of even simple manipulation. I am often asked "how do you do it?" For me the first manipulation is at the click of the shutter.

Now back to some more superficial showmanship ......

Little movies

2005-11-06T07:56:00.000-05:00

From the LA Times article Waters' stills do run deep by Christopher Knight on an exhibition of photobased art by John Waters.

Usually Waters appropriates images that have appeared in mass media, sometimes even shooting off the TV screen. Then he reassembles them, often in sequential strips, in ways their makers never dreamed.

The 79 works emerge as Conceptual Pop — the illegitimate love child of John Baldessari and Andy Warhol. Waters began to make art in 1992, after the triumph of Cindy Sherman and other artists who erased all established distinctions between photography and art. Formally Waters' work is more tame than adventurous, but he's the rare entertainment celebrity who also manages to make art worth looking at.

Waters' working method crosses film editing with collage. He refers to the resulting montages as "little movies," and generally they elaborate on themes familiar to his films. They also reveal a downright obsessive intimacy with all things cinematic.

My first encounter with Waters films was at the Performance Garage on Wooster Street in the late 1970s or early 80s. Intoxicated on cough medicine I watched Multiple Maniacs, Female Trouble and The Diane Linkletter Story projected on what I remember to be a big bed sheet.

Waters' concept of "little movies" is something that intrigues me as an extension of the manipulation and editing that I already do. I had been thinking about this more literally up till now - animating sequences. It will give me something to think about on my way to Hong Kong at the end of the week.

What projects are you working on?

The intolerant myopia of visual artists?

2005-11-04T06:06:00.000-05:00

The Georgia O'keefe Museum is having an internet confernence on the 1980s. I'll spare you my thoughts on the overall unbalanced politics of the debate. I worked for a major NY cultural organization from 1983-2000 and I am convinced that US arts struggle for two reasons: 1.) the professional arts administrator class created permament institutions that saw their own survival as the reason to be thereforenever expiring to let the new in and 2.) the export of US culture forces all consumptive media to be subject to market forces including funding sources.

Anyway there was one post (4th from the bottom) by Olu Oguibe that I thought asked some very tough questions and perhaps the only really meaningful post of those that I have read.

The visual art world, however, spared itself this kind of indulgence, at least to the very best of my knowledge. Instead, the vocal minority in that world, just like the vocal minority on the Right, made it palpably uncool to question the ‘Divine’ right to liberty and artistic license. Seldom was it permitted to ask; Who are we speaking to when we make art, who are we making the art for, what is it we are trying to say with some of the art that provoked conservative assault and how effectively or not do we manage to get those points across, how well were those points being understood? No one seriously asked: When we step out of the protected territory of the artist’s studio and step into the world, what are the ramifications and what must we expect? When we enter the realm of public patronage, what can we insist on and what can we expect to get away with? When we accept municipal and state funding, does that make us perhaps accountable to much more than the sacred muse of individual genius? When clamber up the high-ground of artistic license, on what parameters do we do so and within what perimeters? In the course of the culture wars and their aftermath, the visual art community shied away from one crucial issue, the issue of Responsibility.

And, because many pertinent questions were drowned in the deluge of art world outrage and self-pity, many equally pertinent lessons were not learned. Instead, it seemed that the only lesson learned, at least certainly by artists, was that controversy pays. Because the pertinent lessons were apparently not learned, the art world continues to be harassed and terrorized at will not by the majority of society, but by the vocal minority of conservative fundamentalism. Hence, the repeat scenario of the Brooklyn Museum vs. Mayor Giuliani and the City of New York at the turn of the century, on which occasion the response of the visual art community was anything if not predictable: the chorus repeating the age-old line, “Damn Censorship!” Hardly anyone asked: how do we get across to the silent majority to whom the rabid Right always appeals when it mounts its assaults on cultural expression, and get that majority used to the idea that we are all tax-payers, after all, and have equal rights to the cultural largess of public funds? No one broached the notion that perhaps it is time to engage in a deeper, wider, more serious discussion on the nature and politics of individual cultural expression and representation especially in the public space. And of course, no one was allowed to acknowledge that all dissent has a right to representation, including the protests of the real and supposed philistine minority, that in the case of Mr. Ofili’s use of animal dung to represent a major Christian icon, believers in that Faith had a right to hurt, shock, and outrage; in other words, that outrage is not the exclusive right of the all-knowing, supposedly more cultured, art community. The universal cry of “Damn Censorship!” occluded, as it continues to, the fact that the gains of other critical struggles are being gradually and incrementally eroded every day by artists under the guise of free individual expression, which for instance is why, again in the case of Mr. Ofili’s controversial work, no one paid heed to the fact the use of animal dung to represent a woman’s breasts may indicate a little more than artistic license and freedom of expression, that indeed, it may also serve as a fine example of the return of male license to the image and representation of the female in art.

When the visual art world replicates the intolerant myopia of the philistine, fundamentalist minority as it did during the culture wars by getting caught in the motions of the moment and fighting shy of broad and deep self-reflection, it not only leaves itself open to attack without devising a strategy of effective response, it also allows related and no less important questions to go under the sludge. When we fail to take advantage of certain moments in history to redefine the liberties that we call on society to uphold, we lose sense of the meaning of those liberties and why they matter, why it is important to defend and uphold them. In my thinking, the Era of Reagan and the immediate aftermath was one such lost moment.

So the dirty little secret "the visual art world replicates the intolerant myopia of the philistine, fundamentalist minority" is there - what do you think?

Serendipity and art

2005-11-02T05:34:00.000-05:00

In a New York Times article on Harry C. Dorer, Ronald Smothers reports:

Barbara Yochelson, a historian of photography and a freelance curator of photography exhibits, said that libraries and local historical societies often have such collections, valuing them more as history than as art. But that is changing, she said, as inexpensive digital technology and the Internet have made it easier to duplicate and exhibit pictures, making them accessible to a wider array of people and beginning to blur the line between history and art.

In the last 30 years or so, she added, "vernacular photography" - the kind done by local portrait photographers, journalistic toilers such as Mr. Dorer and drawn from simple family albums - has attracted increasing interest. She said that "serendipity" had always elevated some snapshots to art, but this phenomenon seemed more common.

How has "inexpensive digital technology" created "serendipitous art" in your own work?

Market trends: Vintage, Shmintage

2005-10-29T05:32:00.000-04:00

Frank Van Riper writing in the Washington Post and discussing digital influences in todays's photography market with Washington DC dealer George Hemphill.

Quoting from Hemphill and Van Riper's article:

"Computer-generated Iris and Epson prints, even in signed limited editions such as we (Hemphill) produce, may always be viewed in the higher echelons of the fine art photography market as just that: computer-generated, as opposed to hand-made. I remember, for example, respected New York photography dealer John Stevenson conceding to me that, while beautifully done black and white Iris prints of our Venice work surely can approach -- or even rival at times -- one-of-a-kind platinum/palladium prints, "my clients won't touch them." Why? Largely because Iris prints are produced with the push of a button, and not by a master printer working alone in the dark."

George Hemphill notes that the emergence of large scale photographic work co-exists with the growing influence of design in the artistic preferences of the consumer. "It is surface design that rules the world," he declared, whether it be the curve of a toilet brush bought at Target or the high-tech sheen of a state-of the-art cell phone.

Bottom line: issues of usefulness being equal, "people will pay more money for more pleasing design."

"You want to know how hot photography is? Photography's so hot that people who call themselves photographers, who have minimum skills and crappy equipment and nothing in common [with real photographers], can get shows in Chelsea in one gallery after another."

Well aside from having any shows in Chelsea, I resemble that last remark. Give me something other than photographer to call myself and I'd be happy to do so.

Lowbrow Art

2005-10-28T05:40:00.000-04:00

From the LA Weekly, Doug Harvey on the rise of Lowbrow and how "outlaw" art went mainstream.

"Ironically, the Nazi-era influx of Surrealists and other European progressive/modernist exiles into American cultural centers derailed the highly illustrative art traditions of Regionalism and the Ashcan school, and the legitimacy of accomplished figurative masters like Edward Hopper, Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton — whose work disrupted the alienating class elitism of the art establishment by appealing to the sensibilities of the average American.

In this sense, Lowbrow can be said to have a legitimate claim to the true lineage of modern American art. By reconnecting with pictorialist and figurative traditions despised as kitsch by the art-critical school of Clement Greenberg, opening their visual vocabulary to the most unironically inclusive array of pop-cultural iconography, and embracing the marketplace potentials of Generation eBay, Lowbrow has managed to create what the art world never has — a mass consumer base for art."

I feel a certain kinship to anything that is anti-Greenberg so this is a good thing. I may re-read Tom Wolfe's "The painted word" to reinvigorate my contempt.

What do you think?

Read a book

2005-10-25T03:55:00.000-04:00

Alyson B. Stanfield's "Do This!', an art marketing newsletter suggests celebrating with a book

"You belong to a proud creative tradition. Your artistic heritage is
something you should embrace and be inspired by. And, yet, I find many artists who are oblivious to what has come before them. If you're serious about your career, you'll be curious enough to explore the art and art of times past and the larger artworld.

To celebrate Arts & Humanities Month, I challenge you to read an artist's biography (or similar genre)."

Alsyon recommends a number of books and "How to Draw a Bunny," a documentary about the life of Ray Johnson." I concur that "How to draw a bunny" is well worth the time. Johnson was quite a character.

Although not about the visual arts, I'd recommend Dylan's Chronicles and Goya by Robert Hughes.

Gallery Hopper posts a reading list on photography which is also worth a look.

What do you recommend?

The 'P' word

2005-10-24T04:31:00.000-04:00

From a recent article by Shamik Bag from Kokata Newsline ....

"Photoshop, the photo imaging software, which has positioned the same art of photography artistically opposite what the French master Henri Cartier-Bresson famously defined as capturing “the decisive moment”, and which together with the digital format is radically democratizing click art for the masses, is today both the hero and the villain in the frame."

"As far as I’m concerned, as long as the creative aspect is present in the frame I don’t really care about how it is done." - Atul Kasbekar, photographer.

"It’s ideal for those who don’t have the talent, yet want to become photo artists, and worldwide digital art is yet to make an impact. I think it’s the National Geographic model, where manipulation is a no(t) allowed, which will ultimately survive. Everything else, including Photoshop and the accompanying hype around it, will be discarded ..." - Atanu Paul, Third Eye, a phography school in Kolkata.

My thoughts ...

A hundred years ago the Kodak Brownie camera was "democratizing click art for the masses".

It is the pixel based screen dispaly that is the great democratizer. All images on the screen are made of the same substance which allows the image's aesthetic to stand for itself without relying on an underlying object.

Both traditional and digital tools will survive and be used creatively. It will never be one or the other.

What do you think?

Changing tastes

2005-10-23T10:41:00.000-04:00

The Art Newspaper reports from Frieze in London.

The London private dealer Nicolai Frahm said: “There’s much less photography, which continues the trend we’d seen in recent fairs.”

The New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch said, “There is definitely less photography and a return to painting and to abstraction. But it’s not the same abstraction as we saw before, because that went towards minimalism and minimalism ran into a dead end. This abstraction is more poetic.”

A gospel's rain

2005-10-23T07:14:00.000-04:00

The most interesting thing is the lie

2005-10-23T06:35:00.000-04:00

From the Financial Times profile of Nobuyoshi Araki.

“I have always emphasised the importance of private photography,” he says, “that style of photography really captures human life itself.” He calls this semi-autobiographical approach “I-photography”, a term borrowed from the “I-novels” of Japanese literature. “By definition an ‘I-novel’ is about the writer and is supposed to reveal everything. But it isn’t true,” says Araki. “In order to write, the writer would fabricate something that’s untrue. There is more fiction about the artist himself. So it’s a betrayal, the most interesting thing is the lie, the complete fantasy, the fiction.”

Does this mean Araki’s work is made up of lies? “It’s all mixed,” he says. “The interesting thing is you’re not sure, it’s blurred. It is all about the tales, the mixture of truthfulness and fiction, life and death.”

The I-novelists emerged in the 1920s, consciously separating themselves from western styles of writing. Araki also distinguishes himself from western photographers. “[They] are very conscious about how they are seen, about how their work is seen. They’re very conscious about society and what is going on around them. I don’t care, I’m not interested. I’m only interested in what I want to do.”