Does a photo need to say something?

[WillCAD]

Wow, I go away for a few days and other people join in the debate!

Lots to talk about here. Okay, first of all, not to be picky or anything, but ronnoco, my name is not "Wildcard", it's WillCAD. That's Will with two L's, capital-C, Capital-A, and capital-D, all one word.

First of all, being picky, that is Ronnoco with 2 ns. and no I am not confusing commercial with 2 ms success and winning contests with whether a photo is art or not. You weren't reading carefully. I indicated several times that commercial success and winning contests were just two examples of recognition that suggested quality work and possibly art. Other examples include getting published in a quality magazine or newspaper with a large readership, being asked to present at a conference of professionals, being asked to teach a course in photography, winning a photo contract based on your portfolio versus several others who present theirs, etc. There are all kinds of examples, that recognize quality photo work as a possible art form on a less subjective basis than personal delusion.

Once again you are passing off subjective criteria as being an objective measure of what is or is not art. What if someone is published in a magazine of mediocre quality? Or a newspaper with only a small readership? What if you are asked to present at a conference of serious amateurs? What if people constantly ask you informally for photographic advice (isn't that a form of teaching, just not in an accredited classroom with tenure and a reserved parking space)? What if your portfolio is just as good as the winner of the contract but he underbid you?

All of these things are subjective criteria, not objective, because circumstances and personal preferences can easily change the outcomes of any of them.

Oh, "the conscious use of skill" and skill in a creative media is a combination of talent and learned technique. Creative imagination is where composition, centre of interest and impact come into a work. "Aesthetic" is a judgement based on technique and composition but a judgement in photography based on more objective criteria than simply personal delusion.

My point is that the best in painting, sculpture, design, photography, computer animation etc. is recognized as art by almost everyone. Therefore there must be certain criteria that most people would seem to agree on that make a work art, whether they understand and can express those criteria or not.

Everyone for example would agree that Leonardo Da Vinci had skill and creative imagination and used it to create aesthetic works. His work also withstood the test of time. He is therefore an artist. The same is certainly not true for certain modern "artists" whose works were not recognized by almost everyone and have not survived. Therefore they were not artists.

Time for another dictionary definition: aesthetic
1 a : of, relating to, or dealing with aesthetics or the beautiful <aesthetic theories> b : ARTISTIC aesthetic value> c : pleasing in appearance : ATTRACTIVE aesthetic features -- Mark Mehler>
2 : appreciative of, responsive to, or zealous about the beautiful; also : responsive to or appreciative of what is pleasurable to the senses

So "aesthetic" is all about the beautiful - and beauty is one of the most subjective concepts in all of Human history. Every individual has his or her own personal conception of beauty, making it a completely unquantifiable quality - which throws your idea of "objective criteria" right out the window. There can be no objective criteria defining something that is inherently subjective.

And the argument that work which "survives" is art, and anything that is lost is not art is also hooey. You know as well as I do that there have been great and powerful works of art created by every Human civilization from the day that a guy first smeared charcoal and blood on a cave wall, yet the vast majority of those works is destroyed by changing tastes, shifting cultural mores, and plain old time. Works of art which are today considered some of the greatest in history only date back 1000 years or less, while Humanity has been producing art in one form or another for at least 30,000 years.

Well, Wildcard, you asked for a quoted definition. As a Canadian I work in French as much as English.

To quote from Larousse:

"art...manière de faire une chose selon les règles. Communication de l'expression d'un idéal de beauté dans les oeuvres humaines, habilité."

Salut!

Gracias. Yo no habla la Frances. Could you provide a translation into English for us poor Americans (we speak English and Spanish in the US, instead of English and French as you do in Canada).

Key words: "I don't believe"

While I agree with a lot of what Ronnoco has to say on art, I also think it's a very - ahemm - subjective subject. To some extent, I believe you're all correct. And I also think you're all speaking at cross-purposes. Art can be percieved and defined in many ways. I usually consider there to be "ART" and art. "ART," communicates more broadly and at a deeper level. However, art, is something we can all do. When your art starts to speak to more people and on a more profound level, it starts moving up the ladder towards being ART. I won't presume to say where the line is. But I do believe there is higher art and lower art.

Your humble mediator...

That's sort of what I have been saying all along, John. I also believe that there are many levels of art (more than just the two you mentioned). I believe that something can still be art even if it's crappy art by my standards, and work becomes better and better by the subjective and shifting standards of society it becomes higher and higher art, with works at the pinnacle of a form like DaVinci and Monet and Shakespeare becoming what you termed "ART" (which I would simply call "high art.")

Ronnoco's contention is that anything that doesn’t' qualify as high art is simply not art, a argument that I find absurd, because the idea of what constitutes high art changes as Human society evolves, cultures rise and fall, and fashions and fads come and go.

[Ronnoco]

Wow, I go away for a few days and other people join in the debate!

Lots to talk about here. Okay, first of all, not to be picky or anything, but ronnoco, my name is not "Wildcard", it's WillCAD. That's Will with two L's, capital-C, Capital-A, and capital-D, all one word..

Boy, talk about a Freudian slip there! At least I did not put "Wild" in capital letters!

Ronnoco

[Ronnoco]

Gracias. Yo no habla la Frances. Could you provide a translation into English for us poor Americans (we speak English and Spanish in the US, instead of English and French as you do in Canada)..¨

Well, to be picky in one of the languages that you "poor Americans" speak, it is:

Yo no hablo francés.

And I will provide a translation as requested.

Ronnoco

[WillCAD]

Well, to be picky in one of the languages that you "poor Americans" speak, it is:

Yo no hablo francés.

And I will provide a translation as requested.

Ronnoco

Well, you have me there. Mi Espanol es mui terrible!

[Ronnoco]

Well, you have me there. Mi Espanol es mui terrible!

Try again! You might eventually get it correct.

Ronnoco

[WillCAD]

Your ancient history seems to be at the same level as your facility with Spanish, which is your second language and my fourth. You are obviously not familiar with the recognized art in the caves of Lascaux in France that date to about 30,000 B.C., Glozel, the location of the first alphabet from the same period, ancient Aztec, Mayan, Celtic or Chinese Art just to name a few. It still exists and has not at all been destroyed by changing tastes or subjectivity.

And do you think that the surviving examples of those ancient arts are the ONLY works produced by those cultures? Is it your contention that anything that has been destroyed simply wasn't art? How about the library at Alexandria? Or the thousands of books burned by the Nazis? How about the animation cells from early features like Cinderella and Snow White, which were wiped and re-used for other features? Or the works of early television pioneers, prior to the invention of video tape? Or the early radio works that pre-date the use of audio tape? None of that stuff survives; does that mean it simply wasn't art?

Actually, I am vaguely aware of the paintings at Lascaux (I love the Discovery channel), which, incidentally, have been carbon dated to somewhere between 13,000BC and 15,000BC, not 30,000BC.

If you're acknowledging the Lascaux paintings as art, then you've just blown your entire argument out of the water. The Lascaux cave paintings meet none of your criteria for what constitutes art:

1) The Lascaux paintings were not a "commercial" success, since there was no such thing as an economy when they were painted. You think Ug the caveman paid Urgh the caveman a haunch of venison and a couple of spears to paint horses or bison over his sleeping area?

2) The Lascaux paintings were not published, since there were no publications. But if you can find any issues of Popular Cavepaintings or Cavetechtural Digest from 15,000BC, I'd be very happy to read them.

3) The Lascaux paintings won no awards, since there was no Nobel Prize for Cave Painting or Cannes International Cave Painting Festival.

4) The Lascaux paintings have tremendous historical and anthropological significance, but they have not been acknowledged by the art community as significant works of art in the modern sense. They are indeed some of the most important pieces of art ever discovered, because they are some of the earliest examples of Human artistic endeavor, but by modern standards they are primitive and child-like. To me they resemble nothing so much as a child's refrigerator art - but I still find them beautiful, and I still consider them art, just as I consider a child's drawing to be art.

5) They didn't survive because they were great art that was intentionally preserved by an appreciative art community or an adoring society. They survived because the cave was sealed by nature, preserving the paintings from the elements. You really think that the Lascaux paintings are the only cave paintings created anywhere on Earth during that period? Plenty more must have existed (others have been discovered, but none as extensive or as well-preserved by an accident of nature as Lascaux), but most of them did not survive the ravages of time.

The Lascaux paintings fit none of your criteria for what is or is not art - and yet you clearly acknowledge them AS art. But they do fit my criteria, which is much more simple - "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced."
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/a.../en/visite.htm

Artifacts found at the Glozel site have been carbon-dated, thermoluminescent-dated, and spectrographically dated, and the artifacts fall within several widely varied periods - 300BC-100AD, 5th century AD, 11th-13th century AD, and 15th century AD. The Phoenician alphabet, on the other hand, came into use about 1050BC - so your mention of the Glozel alphabet as "the first alphabet" is historically incorrect.

The wide variation in ages suggests that the treasure trove was originally a personal collection of some kind, probably amassed in the 13th or 15th century AD. Again, these examples of primitive art survived not due to their significance as high art, but due to circumstances - the chamber was buried for centuries, preserving its contents until a cow fell through the ground into the chamber in 1925.

And again, the Glozel artifacts fit none of your criteria that qualify them as art:
1) Commercial success
2) Publication
3) Awards
4) Recognition by other artists

But they do fit my criteria as art:
"the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced."
http://glozel.quickseek.com/

Your ancient history seems to be at the same level as your facility with Spanish, which is your second language and my fourth.

Gee, you're smart. I'm humbled by your vastly superior intellect. Perhaps you'd care to humiliate me further by ridiculing my faculty with English, or cast some aspersions on my ancestry.

Personal insults, and protestations of some sort of intellectual or philosophical superiority, tend to be the last resorts of those for whom facts fail to prove a point.

[Ronnoco]

I believe that I indicated that art survives the test of time,...as in something that was valued as art when it was produced, or later, is still valued as art now. Destruction through history had nothing to do with it.

On that basis, a lot of supposed modern "art" that may have been put up in a few galleries by some curator in the 70's, 80's or 90's and not recognized as art by the majority of the general public has disappeared from the scene, as have the supposed "artists" who created them. That would prove to me that the general public was more correct than the individual curator and it was not art in the first place and the creators were NOT artists.

Ronnoco

[Ronnoco]

In dating which is open to question in archeology and anthropology in any case we are even.

You were closer to being correct on Lascaux. The date was 17,000 B.C. from French experts, not 30,000 B.C. So I missed that one. I may have been thinking of the caves in North Africa, but the name doesn't come to me at the moment. I will go back to some of my books when I get a chance.

However Glozel is 15,000 B.C., again according to French archeologists, so you missed that one. Older than you thought

In dating, I always remember the Central American pyramid of the Mayas dated at about 1000 A.D. by carbon dating. A Russian geologist living in the U.S., found volcanic lava which can be extremely accurately dated because of polarity on various sections of the pyramid. There was absolutely no question that the volcano that spread lava on the pyramid erupted in 8,000 B.C. Pretty difficult if the pyramid was not even built for another 9,000 years.

Ronnoco

[Ronnoco]

!
And the argument that work which "survives" is art, and anything that is lost is not art is also hooey. You know as well as I do that there have been great and powerful works of art created by every Human civilization from the day that a guy first smeared charcoal and blood on a cave wall, yet the vast majority of those works is destroyed by changing tastes, shifting cultural mores, and plain old time. Works of art which are today considered some of the greatest in history only date back 1000 years or less, while Humanity has been producing art in one form or another for at least 30,000 years.

Your ancient history seems to be at the same level as your facility with Spanish, which is your second language and my fourth. You are obviously not familiar with the recognized art in the caves of Lascaux in France that date to about 30,000 B.C., Glozel, the location of the first alphabet from the same period, ancient Aztec, Mayan, Celtic or Chinese Art just to name a few. It still exists and has not at all been destroyed by changing tastes or subjectivity.

Ronnoco