glasswave
Veteran Member
Metal sculpture, that usually invokes welding, is indeed art.
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Is Photography Art?
- Thread starter Mark_A
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jess shudup
Leading Member
And, don't miss the the follow-up thread that will discuss:
What is the meaning of life?
Does sensor size matter, and can we pass the resolution test ?
What is the meaning of life?
Does sensor size matter, and can we pass the resolution test ?
looper1234
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you do realise why it was painted right ? you said the comerical side of it is art.
i say the comercial "art" value is what ever the church paid to get the fresco.
its artistic value lies in the fact that it is so much more than a poster for the church now.
~~~
an every simpler experiment, say the ceiling is not commission by the church, lets pretend it was commisioned by the nudist colony.
the comercial value has changed from selling religion to selling nudity.
but will there be any change to its artistic value ?
the point is, for it to be art, it cannot just serve out its intended purpose, lots of people excel at their jobs, but they are not artists.
any art of sufficent calibre will statisfy this most basic of requirements, hence your insistence of a justification by way of an example, is infantile.
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U
Ubilam
Guest
Anybody can claim to make "art" now. Its a joke, and its sad.
SergioNevermind
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Photography is an art, when made by an artist.
Define ART
Or define ARTIST.
Not simple definitions for me.
Define ART
Or define ARTIST.
Not simple definitions for me.
jtan163
Veteran Member
Is photography art?
Yes.
Legally and culturally.
In many countries, you can talk to the relevant government department and get an arts grant for photography. Ergo legally photography is art.
You can go to an art gallery and see a show that is enitrely based on photography - culturally photography is art.
Are my photographs art?
If I painted (pictures not houses) but did it badly, I'd still be called an artist.
My pictures aren't great art (or even great technically), but they are art.
Simply because photography is consideed an art.
You don't ahve to be good to be called an artist - you have to practise an art.
You only have to be good to be called a "good artist".
Ergo practioners of photography are artists.
Even photographers who practise photography for entirely scientific purposes, e.g. to document and experiment, or crime scene are artists. Take any two of them, and give the the same scene and the same gear, you'll get different images. Same input, different outputs - that's art.
If photography is art you can't call Ansel Adams an artist and not call yourself an artist if you also practise photography.
Your early photos were art.
Perhaps not good art (not for me to judge - beauty -eye - beholder - etc), but art all the same.
You become an artist by practising an art.
But like many, perhaps all arts there are a lot of artists whose works are boring, stereotyped, poorly executed, un-original, even plagurised.
They may not be good, but they are still artists.
jtan163
Veteran Member
I don't think the definition of art is all that hard.
(But I guess I may learn something new in the course of this thread).
Art is where decisions taken by people affect the outcome of the finished work.
It is the expression of ideas, where he production of the involves decisions, which will affect the outcome.
I.e. if you put more people than in the same place, show them the same object , at the same time, give them the same equipment/materials and they produce different work - then those people are artists, and they make art.
If you repeated the exercise and gave them instructions and they came out with the exact same product they would be craftsman or technicians and they'd make products.
In other words art is the creative expression of some idea or feeling.
Merely producing a work that expresses an idea or felling is not enough - there must be a creative element.
E.g.
The person who chooses a camera, film, focus and exposure settings of a scene is an artist.
The person developing the film, might be an artist or might be technician depending on how much there decisions intentionally change the communication of the finished image.
The person who writes the words that critique the photo is an artist.
The person who lays out the book that contains the photograph is an artist.
The guy who runs the offset press thaht produces the book that contains the photo - that's a technician or craftsman.
There is not reason that that printer can't be an artist in their own right, but while they are executing someone else' vision, they are a tecnician.
jtan163
Veteran Member
What is sad about that?
Why shouldn't any body make art?
Art is about expression.
Is your real complaint that any body can make art or that so many people will like/buy/pay too much for art you don't like or identify with?
jtan163
Veteran Member
The photographer in some cases does create the scene.
They choose the backdrop (white seamless), the light (short, rembrandt, whatever), the model (whoever the flavour of the day is), they pose them.
In all cases the photographer choose the various settings that will change the visual properties of the final image. Will it be high, key, low key, in focus, out of focus, blurred on the moving periphery of the subjects limbs, tack sharp all over. Stand in front of a scene with 10 photographers you get 10 different images, Each conveys something different, each has different visual properties.
In other words in some scenarios, photographers almost wholly manufacture, the scene they shoot as well as choosing the settings that will influence the visual properties of the image.
They're not artists?
So if some guy, go sits in the country side with a pallet of paint and a canvas and bangs out a quick landscape, because he is reproducing a scene that was already there, that they did not create, the painting is not art?
Or the sculptor that sculpts a bust of a living person ( that they did not create ) - that sculptor is not an artists?
Just a mere documentarian?
U
Ubilam
Guest
You obviously never had to make a living doing "art".
Of course not. What is quality art is more important. There are great photographers here reading this that must be going nuts but don't reply. Those that pay too much for "art" are uneducated and need to be told what "art" is. Thats the norm now. The critic tells you what is good. Thats whats sad.
Afterall, the more money makes after the weekend release, the better the movie is... right? A photo or painting is not good unless others like it.
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jtan163
Veteran Member
What does how I or anyone else makes there living got to do with the fact that anyone can make art or your statement "that anyone can make art now is sad"?
Are you saying that it is harder to make a living as an artist in certain fields now?
IMO Those that buy art on the basis of a recomendation of a broker or critic aren't really buying art.
They are speculating in a commodity or purchasing a status symbol/trophy.
That the commodity happens to be art is neither here nor there, they are not buying it as art. They are buying it as an investment or a trophy.
That's the same with most saleable commodities now.
Some arbiter of taste tells people what is good and most people follow that recomendation and buy what is recomended or it they can't afford it, they lust after it.
But that does not make the fact that a lot of people can make a similar product bad.
E.g. there are certain farms that people will pay 3-4 times the price for the beef they produce than if it was produced elsewhere. Is it bad that other farms still produce beef, that is cheaper or "not as good"? Or should only the artisanal produce continue to produce beef?
Well the more money the movie makes in it's releae the better it is as a comercial endeavour.
Not necessarily as an artistic endeavour - though it may be.
A lot of people enjoy those blockbuster movies - I tend not to. To me they tend to be formulaic and say little for fear of offending someone and thereby damaging their commercial "goodness".
But just because some person produces a movie that makes lots of money, and I don;t liek it doesn't make it sad that the kid next door can make a movie that I love.
Just means my tastes might be different to most people, and my opportunity to see the kids movie was fortunate.
I still don't understand why you say that it is sad that anyone can make art.
SirLataxe
Veteran Member
"Art" is one of those words that can't be defined without reference to a context of some kind. It's a bit like that other often bandied-about word "freedom". One must ask, freedom from what? Freedom to do what? And then argue about who or what can enjoy freedom and how they all interact with each other.
The same is true of "art". It tends to mean different things in different contexts. But if the definition is to be the post-modern one, that "my activity/product is art if I intended it to be so", then the word (like a lot of post-modern stuff) becomes so self-referential that it ceases to have any transmittable meaning at all.
Personally I like to use a tight rather than a loose definition of "art". I think of art as human-centric activity and construction that transcends current reality by revealing previously not-understood or inchoate meanings via the use of highly plastic materials by a person who has the skill and understanding to render those transcendent constructions so that others understand their message.
This definition requires quite a lot of the artist. It also excludes products and processes that do not begin with "highly plastic materials" so that what is produced contains a lot of "the agenda of the tools used" despite what the would-be artist has in his own agenda.
This means that, for me, it is difficult to see most photography as art, since the cameras, editing software, printers and monitors all have a very extensive "agenda of the tool", built-in by their manufacturers and designers.
Yet it is certainly possible to see photographs that "transcend current reality by revealing a previously not understood or inchoate meaning". But this is not really a function of the photographer deciding the moment, viewpoint and exposure - these are minor craft matters that are essentially making a 2D copy of a portion of reality already designed, available and understood.
Any art comes either before photography (eg in the set-design, lighting and so forth) or later (in the development process) where the usual objective of photography (making an accurate representation of a normal reality) is put aside in favour of making a transcendent image that has altered reality to amplify, reveal, emphasise or otherwise create additional meaning over and above what reality reveals to the recording device (the camera) or a normal human eye/consciousness.
****
But there's no doubt that people use "art" in different contexts with different definitions than mine, above. All these usages are perfectly legitimate - but for the word "art" to actually mean something, it's required that the context of it's use be made clear. And sometimes the word "art" implies qualities in what is described as such when no such qualities exist......
For example, when I paint a watercolour I am in one sense "doing art" even though my daubs have no artistic merit at all. The same might be said of much of photography, especially the kind that remains a faithful 2D copy of already extant reality.
But non-artistic photography can still be a skilled craft producing very worthwhile images. In fact, most of it is like that - from wildlife documentors using state-of-the art equipment to family history-recorders with their snappers.
SirLataxe, who would himself like to make art but generally only manages craft.
warriormouse
Veteran Member
it's simple for me - my good photographs are good photographs, and my bad ones, such as my last weeks Sunday Cat! one, are art
Mark_A wrote:
Hi sjstremb,
My OP question is genuine, I am not informed (a dope if you like), I have no idea of the history of photography having never studied it (or art). But this cropped up in another thread where a poster basically said photography is not art it is just automated reproduction. Rather than foul up that thread too much I decided to make another. I am aware that this is not the first time it has been discussed on here.
Anyhow your post is most welcome, coming from someone who has studied art my feeling is that not all photography is art, but some definately is. Usually I can tell which is which just by looking
Mark
Mark,
The good professor probably responded in that tone because it is a question he has had to answer hundreds of times and has gotten tired of it. However, he raises some points about the history of photography that I think you be interesting and useful to you. In the 19th century photography was viewed as technology and documentation and not art, but there were several who wished to see what could be done to raise photography to an art form rather than documentation. To examine this further look up the pictorialists and other similar movements of the late 19th and earlier 20th century that did bring photography into art galleries and museums. However, from the 1940's forward photography did move to being more dominated by the technical documentation approach. The turn to digital, however, has opened a wide range of tools for artistic interpretation of imagery that few photographers had access to in the past. That is why we now see it as a question again. I agree with the professor that the issue was settled in the late 19th and early 20th century, but many modern photographers are unaware of that history.
Paul B Jones
Veteran Member
I titled this image an "art shot":
That means I blew the photo opportunity so I cropped heavily and jammed the levels in post-processing to try and salvage something.
There is no rule that art has to be good.
That means I blew the photo opportunity so I cropped heavily and jammed the levels in post-processing to try and salvage something.
There is no rule that art has to be good.
Riquez
Leading Member
Your view seems rather closed minded. Why can someone not use photography to create art?
When Monet painted lily pads on a pond, was he just documenting? He didn't create the scene, he just made an image of what was already there.
I think that photography can absolutely be art.
Although photography is a way of visually documenting things that exist in the world, a photo can also be taken in such a way which reveals things we don't always notice, or highlights the unique beauty of a moment, or speaks to you in a way that triggers an emotion.
Herein lies the art. It matters not if the photographer created the scene or used the world around them, it is how the resulting image speaks to the viewer.
glasswave
Veteran Member
Yes, of course. Fresco, I believe.
Yes, commercial art is art. You are being quite obtuse, do you agree or disagree? If you agree, then your original promise is negated.
Like any tangible property, it's value changes over time.
Yes, context affects artistic value.
You're right. Only those that create art are artists. OTH, another definition of artist can be:
Your failure to cite an example that justifies your original premise, is infantile, as well as your refusal to address my specific questions asked and points made.
looper1234
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omg, i wasted so much time on a philistine.
antoineb
Veteran Member
nt
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