In my six years of blogging, there is one post that I started to write maybe up to ten times, and each time, I refrained from posting it. Maybe it’s time to get it out of my system. It’s not even anything particularly interesting, even though I’m sure some people might disagree.

I sometimes get an email with a link suggestion and a comment along the lines of “these photos are great, they use [add your favourite process here]“. I don’t care much about the process when looking at photography (unless the process is an integral part of the photography, which is almost never the case). What I mean by that is that whatever it took to produce a photograph does not determine whether the result is good or bad.

Using a so-called toy camera, for example, doesn’t automatically produce a great photo. A light leak or a soft lens might contribute to what makes a particularly photo good, but that doesn’t mean that if you buy a Diana camera (which are now in production again and sold for way too much money - seriously, if you want one buy a vintage one on Ebay) you’re guaranteed good photos.

The same is true for large-format cameras. There almost is a cult of large-format photography out there. It’s true, large-format cameras can lead to very spectacular results, but using a large-format camera is no guarantee for that.

Or take vintage/alternative photography processes, many of which are notoriously hard to use. But as before, using a wet-plate collodion-type process (or whatever that might be called) does not guarantee good photographs.

For me, photography is an art form and not a craft (not that there’s anything wrong with crafts - I’m just not as interested in crafts as in art). How a photograph is produced I find not all that interesting (which probably in part explains why I don’t share the wide-spread rejection of digitally created work). At the end of the day, I am interested in the image.

-Jörg M. Colberg

Originally posted at Concientious

as When The Medium Becomes The Message, 2008

Ans: Art is the indirect conveyance of altered realities.

When an artist creates a material art form, he has the intention to re-create his state of emotions and thoughts that make up his reality, into matter. True objective reality is altered by a person’s subjective perception, even more so when the mediums of art present a further distortion of the artist’s sense of reality as he creates it.

Reality is generated from flow and non-flow of energy and vibrations in different matter and colors. Beauty is created using lots of flowing qualities in information and ugliness is created using lots of blockages in flow of information. An artist skillfully manipulates the two qualities to re-create his sense of reality that is intended to be conveyed into his artwork. The skill of the artist would affect how well he can convey his intentions into the manipulation of his art.

Art is man-made, artificial and intentional. Forms that are not intentional are natural.

The language of art is indirect as it uses a non-spoken, non-written language to bring the observer into the artist’s perceived reality. It uses form, color, texture, light etc to re-create the intended reality and intended messages that were conceived in the mind of the artist.

Qn: How can I spot true art from non-art?

Ans: True art has intended messages and brings the observer into an altered reality shared by the artist. If an art form does not satisfy this criteria, then it generates little interests to its observers. There is little meaning if artists would use lots of time to create something that conveys little. Art that has little meaning or aesthetic value would risk being called fake and boring.

The artist creates art to convey an altered reality. Art uses no spoken language. It is an indirect conveyance of altered realities. The more an art form can convey such, the more it has the substance to be called art.

Functional purposes of art forms can be found in cars, clothes, jewelery, crafts and food. However, the functional aspects would dilute or sacrifice the artistic quality and distract the observer from the messages and feelings the artist intended to convey. Pure art should contain as much observable qualities and the least amount of functional purposes.

Qn: Why do some art pieces cost so much?

Ans: Art is judged by its ability to convey the historic reality and messages of the artist. If an artwork can satisfy this criteria and brings the observer a meaningful and satisfying experience, then it is a worthy piece of art. Such art is priceless and cannot be bought simply with money.

Some artwork are seemingly simplistic yet they represent great historical value. Then it is the history, and not the aesthetic value of the artwork that would affect its value and price.

- Timothy Tang

Author of Real Answers to The Meaning of Life and Finding Happiness

http://ultimatemeaningoflife.blogspot.com

Statements submitted to What Isn’t Art in email, 2008

-Jonathan Harris

Creator of We Feel Fine, Time Capsule, and many other projects.

Quote for What Isn’t Art by email, 2008

]]> http://www.whatisntart.net/jonathan-harris-computer-scientistartist-2008/feed/ http://www.whatisntart.net/salvador-dali-artist-1957/ http://www.whatisntart.net/salvador-dali-artist-1957/#comments Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:28:41 +0000 What Isn't Art? http://www.whatisntart.net/?p=47 What’s My Line?

-Salvador Dali

From the 1950s TV show What’s My Line?

Episode 347, first aired 1957

- Mike Gagnon

I can think of many things that are indeed art but its difficult to disqualify something as art. I’m not entirely sure you can actually disqualify something as art. Sure you can say that you don’t like a certain type of art, but just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it isn’t art. Just because you THINK it doesn’t take skill, creativity or even hard work to create a certain work of art doesn’t disqualify it as art. YET even so there are those who try to disqualify things such as video games(which is a blend of many different forms of art) as artwork.

- Thomas J L Kastner

Art goes into so much these days especially with design, that is almost impossible to say something isn’t art. Our world is so artfully designed if you think about it. Everything is being designed to be comfortable to the eye and in a sense beautiful. So what might not be art would be empty voids of space.

- Samuel Jagoda

I tend to think (well, I especially thought this back when I was actually an art major) that art is more about the craft and process than the philosophy behind what you’re doing.

- Valerie Mitchell Hernandez

Wall posts from the What Isn’t Art Facebook Group, 2008

It is clear that exercising power with love requires a great deal of work, but what is this about the risk involved? The problem is that the more loving one is, the more humble one is; yet the more humble one is, the more one is awed by the potential for arrogance in exercising power. Who am I to influence the course of human events? By what authority am I entitled to decide what is best for my child, spouse, my country or the human race? Who gives me the right to dare to believe in my own understanding and then to presume to exert my will upon the world? Who am I to play God? That is the risk. For whenever we exercise power we are attempting to influence the course of the world, of humanity, and we are thereby playing God. Most parents, teachers, leaders - most of us who exercise power - have no cognizance of this. In the arrogance of exercising power without the total self-awareness demanded by love, we are blissfully but destructively ignorant of the fact that we are playing God. But those who truly love, and therefore work for the wisdom that love requires, know that to act is to play God. Yet they also know that there is no alternative except inaction and impotence. Love compels us to play God with full consciousness of the enormity of the fact that that is just what we are doing. With this consciousness the loving person assumes the responsibility of attempting to be God and not to carelessly play God, to fulfill God’s will without mistake. We arrive, then, at yet another paradox: only out of the humility of love can humans dare to be God.

- Morgan Scott Peck

Excerpt from his book The Road Less Traveled, 1978

Suggested by Mark Uzmann

- Tullio Francesco DeSantis

Interview with art critic Ron Schira on youtube, 2007

When photography was born, mechanical efficiency was much on everybody’s mind. A number of observers though photographs would be great time savers for artists: make more studies than they could ever make, catch details they’d missed. We know now that artists relied heavily on photographs, but kept mum about it. Too embarrassing. The hand and eye were supposed to be enough; mechanical intervention was suspect. Yet Renoir, and later Picasso, said boldly that photography had freed painting for other tasks. If this machine could bring back nature as it was (only a few doubted that it really did that), maybe art didn’t have to bother. Photography, however, wanted everything, its own natural province and any other it could attain. Almost as soon as it became clear that art could do without the everyday world altogether, photography tried to follow suit. The camera had already been flirting with abstraction for some time when, in 1917, Alvin Langdon Coburn took his first non-objective photographs.

Photography’s relation to the other arts has always been equivocal. It was clear right away that the new medium would broaden general knowledge of art. In the nineteenth century, a thoughtful man like M. A. Root could assume that a wide dissemination of images would increase happiness and improve taste. In our own day we are less certain about happiness and taste; the glut of images threatens to reduce nearly everything to the same measurable staleness. What we appreciate and how we see have doubtless changed, for better or worse, because of photographs. William Ivins, an expert on prints, pointed out how limiting was the syntax of the graphic arts, which had been the only transmitters of painting and sculpture, and how photography made available certain styles, certain eras that could not be perceived clearly before.

Photography and art were always tangled, are tangled still. D. O. Hill doctored his photographs to make them more painterly. Illustrators were soon forced to copy photographs. The pictorialists fiddled with gum prints till they looked like chalk drawings, charcoals, anything but photographs. Today painters from Rauschenberg to Warhol appropriate photographs, which they use as freely as palette knives. The photo realist painters make a virtue of looking merely photographic. The holograph approaches sculpture.

Is photography among the fine arts? Once that was a burning question; it smolders in some spots even now. In 1857, Lady Eastlake wrote that what photography does best is “beneath the doing of a real artist at all.” Two years later Baudelaire stormed against the heartless bourgeois ‘facticity’ of the camera. Critics said photography was art if the photographer’s hand tinkered heavily with the print in the darkroom. Illustrators cried shame, humbug, and mechanical besides. Then Stieglitz took to the battlements to proclaim that a true artist could produce art no matter what the medium. In a typical fencing posture, George Bernard Shaw announced that photography was not only an art but a better one than painting. Eventually, the proponents of straight photography decided that photographs were art only if they were pure: no laying on of hands, no tinkering.

All that is clear is that the question is unclear. Probably it doesn’t matter. The way the issue is usually put, it excludes news, fashion, advertising photographs, and of course snapshots.  In the 1970s, the surging popularity (and marketability) of photography brought all these maverick forms into the fold, at least temporarily.  These forms - and passport photographs, police photographs, x-ray, microscopic, and telescopic photographs, not to mention film and television - influence the way we dress, eat, vote, think, live, and even die. We have no appropriate definition for photography yet. Possibly it is so complex we never will. Lady Eastlake offered a good starting point when she spoke of a “new form of communication between man and man = neither letter, message, nor picture, which now happily fills up the space between them.”

- Vicki Goldberg

Excerpt from the introduction to Photography In Print, 1981

- Milton Glaser

Interviewed by Hilman Curtis for Adobe, 2007

Sent in by Jonathan Fasulo

With the two tin cans I took the most childlike form of communication and characterized them with a positive and negative pole. This underlines that in the universal sense communication has to be there. The form of the tins has to be extended, since it is only then that the thing takes on a meaning. The tins themselves cannot offer that. They indicate merely a simple elementary procedure: the concept of transmitter and receiver. . . that means two stations, whether they are individuals or groups of people that are connected. A connecting string and a positive and negative pole and the two begin to exchange information. But that is still not a declaration of what a contemporary theory of information could be. The tins cannot offer that, but they can stimulate an impetus if an intuitive person comes across them. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Another person could come and just see the things-two tin cans-that are anyway no worse than a Brancusi sculpture.”

“But if the concept of art becomes anthropological it is totalized and really does refer to human creativity, to human work and not simply the work of artists. Why anyway should the term art refer to the work of painters and sculptors? That is simply a restriction that never existed before.”

- Joseph Beuys

Excerpts from the interview Questions to Joseph Beuys, 1970

conducted by Jörg Schellmann and Bernd Klüser

Sent in by Claudia Luethi