"Against Interpretation" S. S.

<p>It's occurred to me (memory?) that my thoughts on interpretation of photographs (essence etc) had been addressed directly by somebody. Couldn't remember who. But I vaguely remembered that someone (thank goodness) had thunk it before I did.</p>

<p>So I Googled a phrase that I remembered in an off moment. Didn't remember whose essay it was, but I remembered that somebody I respected had pointed me to it decades agao. Seems central to an aspect of photography.</p>

<p>Turns out it was the phrase of somebody we often turn to when our thinking is fancy-schmancy.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-againstinterpretation.html">http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-againstinterpretation.html</a></p>

<p>My own photos are often a little too easily interpreted to be fine work, in my own frame of reference.</p>

<p>Fine work can't be interpreted.</p>

<p>Your thoughts? Those are mine. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>Art has to be interpreted or it has no meaning at all. If it has no meaning, it's not art, just interior decorating.</p>

<p>Interesting thought, Craig.</p>

<p>I think your thought makes sense if you write about "art" for a living, but I don't think photographers interpret. Do they? Do you? <strong>What do you want us to interpret from your online photos? </strong>Since you believe in interpretation, you surely can tell us specifically what to interpret when viewing your own work. Yes? No?</p>

<p>Me, I can't even come close to that with my own stuff (nor do I want to), except for a few I've stooped to labeling.</p>

<p><strong>In any case, I was thinking about photography rather than "art." </strong>Obviously, if one photographs a rock or girlfriend or flower one is<em> rarely</em> making "art". One is merely making nothing much. But one can <em>sometimes </em>make a little bit of art that way (Picasso did, Stieglitz did, have you? I <em>don't</em> think I have).</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Sontag comes close to reducing content to interpretation and meaning. I think that's a mistake. I do think, as she does, interpretation and meaning often seek to (over)simplify and even stifle a more sensuous engagement with photographs (what she calls "erotic"). And I agree with her when she says that the distinction between form and content is an illusion. But otherwise I think she over-identifies content with interpretation and meaning.</p>

<p>In making my own photographs, I am strongly content-driven. I photograph my subjects. And I photograph my subjects in situations. That, to me, is content. That's what I encounter and what I hope viewers encounter. I don't interpret and don't necessarily hope for viewers to interpret that content. But it is content.</p>

<p>It wasn't light or texture or focus or anything particularly "formal" that urged me to photograph <a href="../photo/6381585&size=lg">ken and mark</a>. It was content. (Sometimes light itself can supply that content.) People can interpret or try to give meaning to what might have been going on or to what they see. That step was not on my mind when I photographed and it's not much on my mind when I view the photo. But the uninterpreted content is very much there.</p>

<p>One can feel or sense, and a photographer can create, an unfolding story without providing a literal narrative or representation. Even the most recognizable of scenes (like two men in bed) can maintain a great deal of abstraction. An interpretation will seek to alleviate that abstraction, may undermine participation in the encounter, by imposing meaning on it. If one stays in Sontag's erotic mode, one can experience the content . . . participate . . . without putting a name to or stepping back from it.</p>

<p>It's useful to start from a point where mind has no capacity for interpretation such as we find in Alzheimer's, for example. It is evident that without interpretation of some sort objects cannot be identified or remembered in any coherent way. There is some basic mechanism underlying our ability to make sense of the things we see and experience.</p>

<p>It has occurred to me lately that any generalization of the things around us without the actual details necessary to explain their presence must, of necessity be a form of myth-building. That is, myth is directed story making that serves to provide a more simplified view of things as a means to relieve the mind of keeping and cleaving to the millions of details required for a complete (and wasteful) exegesis of our ordinary surroundings. Most things simply do not justify that much work. Just as computers have limits on the amount of information they can handle at once so does the mind.</p>

<p>I believe that myth is a good and necessary thing. Myth is the outer story instead of the inner story. It is any explanation that describes a result without giving justice to the processes leading up to it. You can see that this is much more commonplace than the grand ancient stories that are so familiar to us. </p>

<p>So we come to interpretation. Experience without mind has no interpretation and no meaning whatsoever. The truth is that some sort of brain damage must occur to make this condition possible. Otherwise interpretation will occur. Whether you like the story or not, or believe that you can manipulate it by loading an image with symbols and suggestive imagery, your viewer will create an explanation of his own for what he sees. I think the best you can do is to make an image you hope will attract enough interest from a viewer to engage his attention long enough for him to react to it.</p>

<p>When reading the text of Sonntag, I cannot prevent myself from trying to explain why she found a need for writing what she wrote and reflecting on what she might write today, had she had the chance. Those of us that have experienced the period of the late 1960s and the '70s recognize maybe with some nostalgia, the call for original feelings and thoughts. We did not need to hope for a rapid development of Alzheimer, as Albert seems to suggest, but knew of others means available, like probably Sonntag also. However, again most of us, I would believe, were rapidly called back to the reality of the world we lived in and still live in - in which art plays out it's role. <br>

Personally I can follow Sonntag when she make reference to</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be ... just what it is"</p>

</blockquote>

<p>And when she refer to art that manage to be free of interpretation and have the luck to be</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"left alone from people with minds"</p>

</blockquote>

<p>although, I don't know where the very cerebral Sonntag ever got that insight from!<br>

Such works of art exist surely, but it is not necessarily the very definition of art nor the only way of relating to art. Other ways might be to understand it, to interpret it, to make critics of art.</p>

<p>A question of relevance here might be to which degree <strong>a photo</strong> can be - or ever is- an example of a work of "art" : "<em>so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be ... just what it is" - </em>whatever that is? A question not to be answer for those that can prevent themselves from it, of course.<br>

Another question would be if such "works of art" are predominant in contemporary art and contemporary photography, or have we not seen a booming of art forms where interpretation is not only something "mindful" people do to it, but inherent part of the "work of art" either because the artist presents an explicit interpretation of something or because the artist deliberately provokes interpretations on the part of the viewers.</p>

 

<p>Great responses.</p>

<p>Mention of Alzheimers is interesting...I'm not sure the damage makes one mindless (until the end), or that it makes interpretation impossible. My impression (from only a few individuals) is that a rotating or flashing kind of jumbled-sequential kind of awareness (even momentary rationality) can occur, even in very late stages. Alzheimers people certainly can be verbal, just as is "interpretation."</p>

<p>Note that Sontag wrote about <strong>verbal </strong>interpretation, ie words and sentences. I don't think words and sentences are inherent in responses to photographs...but perhaps some of us (not me) immediately go to verbalization (interpretation). Right now I'm looking at photos by Anders, Fred, and Albert Richardson (bottom of page) and I'm pretty sure my responses aren't interpretive...certainly not verbally.</p>

<p>Might be hard to make the case that "interpretation" can be non-verbal, but maybe somebody will give that a shot here.</p>

<p>It seems odd to me that someone would position relatively direct, non-interpretive responses to photographs as "nostalgic" (sounds more political than "art"-related).</p>

<p>My impression is that producing "artists" (as opposed to scholars) have always worked at least partially from non-analytic, non-verbal sensibilities. Unless, of course, they're word people, essayists, novelists or critics, like Ms Sontag. I'm not denying that people like Picasso could verbalize things as they painted (don't know), but I've watched film of him painting and it seemed a sequence of nearly instantaneous processes...he didn't talk. My impression is that some poets (and song writers) use the elements of interpretation perhaps-backward, unwinding conventional meaning to produce effects or response that defy or intend to escape interpretation. So I'm not saying words are useless in response to photos...maybe a poem or song would come closer to my kind of response than does interpretation?</p>

<p>Let me underline that I'm not saying photographs can't be art, though of course I do deny that many qualify. :-)</p>

<p> </p>

<p>This leaps out: "...I cannot prevent myself from trying to explain.."</p>

<p>Anders, am I giving that too much importance? Do you typically find yourself forced to "explain" when you read someone else's writing? Do you respond that way to photographs as well? </p>

<p>I'm reading Melville currently, have just finished reading the chapter that describes a nautical sermon. I felt myself carried along by the writing, the way I am by some photographs: I didn't have to "prevent myself" from explaining. Why?</p>

<p>Because the work itself is so strong...it doesn't need my interpretation: Maybe interpretation becomes useful when the work is relatively weak?</p>

<p>I think Susan Sontag is looking for an alternative to what might be called "criticism by formula." She is well aware that criticism can become ingrown and stale to the point where the critic finds just what he is looking for in a work, but that in the process he somehow misses the point. She prefers a more spontaneous reaction to art that allows the work to persuade the critic rather than have the critic make the determination of what a work represents.</p>

<p>I don't think she opposes anyone's personal subjective reaction to art, and, in fact, laments that in our modern age this seems so difficult. Here's how she ends her essay:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. <br /><br /><br>

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.<br /><br /><br>

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>It's clear that she is addressing her concerns to professional critics who make a living systematically teasing the significance out of art, and not to individuals who might apply a good deal of intelligence and sensibility to their experience of appreciating it. I have never had a professional critic analyse one of my photographs, and I have to admit that I'm not sure I would even take something like this seriously! (I have to confess that my photographs are like the kid chosen last to play baseball. No one takes much notice of them at all!) Perhaps another respondent to the thread might tell about his reaction and experience if such an encounter has actually taken place.</p>

<p>Albert,</p>

<p>What you say, and what Ms. Sontag said, in your selected quotes, vibrates with me. Especially the following:</p>

<p>"Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, <strong>much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there</strong>. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all."</p>

<p>You asked about experience of an encounter with a critic. A well-known local art critic (affiliated with monthly arts magazines and newspapers) visited our little seasonal art gallery on a number of occasions over 5 years. "Seeing more" and not "squeezing more content out of the work than is already there" risks contradictory aims or situations. Two of my artists received criticism that was appreciative, but which saw things in their quite oroiginal work and in them (or rather in their perceived approaches) that they had trouble assimilating on the basis of their own feelings and knowledge of their work. I was glad to receive a critique later from him, in his chronicle in a magazine mainly devoted to cinematic art. Firstly, I didn't feel my work deserved his recognition, but, like the two painters, I felt he was describing my small exhibition and my approach in a manner that imputed to them qualities of expression that they did not have. At least, I would have thought of them in far simpler terms. Perhaps he had an audience to think of as well as the artist or photographer? The details of these apparent disconnects and the work that incited them are interesting, but I think too involved to easily present here.</p>

<p>The critic, an artist himself and writer, had undoubtedly greater experience in the field than myself, or perhaps the younger of our other two artists reviewed in the maneer I am suggesting. What he said, or a part of that, would be expected to have some import. However, I sensed a modern tendency for those in the art world, critics and artists alike, to suggest meanings in approaches, and in the works themselves, that go beyond the evident or even rational. Interpretations that are overly poetic. Is it something that Sontag warns of in the quote you cited and I have put into bold, or is it a fashion that the art world has subscribed to in the post modern period? Learning to “see more” is possibly also a disadvantage, if that seeing is more fanciful thinking and less actual seeing.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>John said:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>My impression is that producing "artists" (as opposed to scholars) have always worked at least partially from non-analytic, non-verbal sensibilities.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Interestingly, I just heard a radio interview last night with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin on NPR. The interviewer asked him what he thought about several things pertaining to his music. He replied: “I never stop and think anything, and that's why talking to you is quite a revelation," Plant says. "I never even think about these things. When you're in a recording studio and you've got a microphone, and the tape's rolling, and everybody's playing, you just do it. You go into this place that makes sense for the moment.”<br>

My own experience of photographing is similar. I go into “visual mode” and just do it. Interpretation is what someone else does later. It serves a purpose as a way for people communicate their impressions of something to other people. We can’t help it; we are a thinking, analyzing, verbalizing species. </p>

<p>John Kelly wrote:</p>

<p><em>"<strong>In any case, I was thinking about photography rather than 'art.' </strong>Obviously, if one photographs a rock or girlfriend or flower one is rarely making 'art'. One is merely making nothing much. But one can sometimes make a little bit of art that way (Picasso did, Stieglitz did, have you? I don't think I have)."</em></p>

<p>John, this seems (to me) to reveal something fundamental about your point of view, something with which I disagree.</p>

<p>Allow me first to paraphrase your statement:</p>

<p><em>"Obviously, if two teams of 15-year-olds (eleven kids per team) are competing with a football according to generally accepted rules, they are rarely 'playing football'. They are merely doing nothing much. But they can sometimes attain a little bit of 'playing football' that way (Johnny Unitas did, Joe Namath did, have you? I don't think I have)." </em></p>

<p>Why would one say these kids are doing "nothing much", just because they're playing at a low level in comparison to the absolute masters of the game? Do only such acknowledged masters--and only in their rarest, most brilliant, most successful plays--actually "play football"? What constitutes "playing football"? And in exactly the same sense, what constitutes "making art"?</p>

<p>Athletes can play football well or badly, at a level that is world-beating or is simply laughable. But consciously making the effort to play and win the game--no matter how amazing or how wretched their actual performance--is still "playing football" in the eyes of almost everyone.</p>

<p>Likewise, an elementary-school play may require adult audience members to bite their tongues on occasion, to avoid inappropriate laughter at missteps by the very young actors and actresses--but would anyone think to claim that such a production is "not a play", just because it's being carried out at a very low level?</p>

<p>In the same way, a person trying to create art (photographs) may produce images that hang in the Louvre, or may hang only on an indulgent mother's refrigerator (or may get only quick glances on a Photo.net page on a few computer screens, then are even more quickly forgotten).</p>

<p>Images may be judged--fairly--to be "professional" or "amateurish" or "childish" or "incoherent" or simply "boring"; and may elicit admiration, interest, jeers or indifference. But if an image was <em>intended</em> to be art, then even if it appears to<em> </em>fail at the most basic level, an objective critic is obligated (it seems to me) to say that the image is "failed art" or "poor art" or "unoriginal art", etc. (and be able articulate his rationale, when challenged).</p>

<p>If the <em>intention</em> of the person who made a photograph was to make<em> </em> art--even if his subject is "a rock or girlfriend or flower"--then <strong>who's to say</strong> that the resulting image is not "art"? You? Who?</p>

<p> </p>

<p><em>"If the intention of the person who made a photograph was to make art--even if his subject is "a rock or girlfriend or flower"--then <strong>who's to say</strong> that the resulting image is not "art"? You?"</em></p>

<p>Yes, me. You do understand. </p>

<p>You're right: some think "intention" equals result. You do, I don't. </p>

<p>However, you're nothing like "objective." You're simply someone who accepts the most popular view. </p>

<p>The notion that art, school plays, refrigerator magnets, and low level athletics are comparable phenomena demonstrates an aversion to questions of value (not "quality," "value"). But even you may have noticed that some folks have aesthetic, perceptual, or communicative skills that others don't have, and that some are better photographers than others, better in the absolute sense. Some photographers don't need the "art" crutch, some do.</p>

<p>Quite a lot of photography transcends art. </p>

<p>John Kelly wrote:<br>

<em>"<strong>In any case, I was thinking about photography rather than 'art.'</strong></em></p>

<p>But Sontag was clearly 'verbalizing' about art.<strong> </strong>At about the same time that Sontag wrote that essay, Szarkowski and Winogrand were symbiotically redefining photography by placing <em>description </em>before the kind of sentimental photographic interpretation that culminated with Steichen's family of Man. <em> </em></p>

<p>"I don't have messages in my pictures...The true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film." --- GW.</p>

<p>"There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly <em>described</em> I like to think of photographing as a two way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by <em>describing</em> it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both."<br>

---- GW</p>

<p> This was happening as Post-Modernism unfolded into the art world. Sontag was not the first to propose this, nor the last. If I remember, the proponents of this anti-intellectual drive (and it seems ridiculous to think of Sontag as an anti-intellectual) were then-known as <em>vitalists, </em>and they did not represent a monolithic group by any means.</p>

<p>[i wonder what PoPpers think of Post-Modernism] </p>

<p> IMO, it is ridiculous to slam critics these days, as they're nearly extinct, perhaps a little less so in photography than in other media, and not for the reasons Sontag was addressing.</p>

<p><br /></p>

<p>Ernest, I hope making art is more than the declaration, "This is art."</p>

<p>Art is, at least in part, craft. Cabinetmakers don't make a cabinet by looking at a few pieces of wood and declaring them to be a cabinet. Who's to say it is or is not a cabinet? Well, these things are decided all the time. Who's to say indeed? That it's a tough question to answer doesn't mean everything someone says is a cabinet is a cabinet.</p>

<p>I agree with you, Ernest, that there is good and bad art. And the same reasoning leads me to the conclusion that there is also art and non-art.</p>

<p>Albert, we are indeed a thinking, analyzing, verbalizing species. The question Sontag seems to be asking (and answering) is why we verbalize the way we do. Why don't we verbalize about our physical and emotional reactions and about what we see as much as we verbalize what we think visual things "mean"?</p>

<p>Sontag's essay can be read as a challenge to photographers and viewers -- as well as critics -- to learn a way of seeing. Just as we learn how to expose for different lighting and what an f-stop is about, a viewer (and a photographer as viewer) can learn ways of seeing that resist the more "common" approaches. Just as many of us want to make more significant photos than the average snap-shooter or refrigerator magnet maker, many of us have honed our viewing skills over the years as well. Leaning less on the proclivity to interpret may open some doors not only for us as viewers but for us as photographers. It might be similar to leaning less on automatic camera settings.</p>

<p>If I understand the point, Luis rightly underlines the different approaches to photography as an art form, where on the one side there are fine photographers like Gary Winogrand who are more concerned it would seem with overcoming the difficulties of showing the world "as it is" (which he most clearly overcame) and seeking that as objective, and others who are less concerned with what they see and the need for a visual representation as close as possible to that perception, and more inhabited with a desire to use the subject matter and subject to create a message, either intentional, or simply felt, and which is different from an unmanipulated view of their subject. </p>

<p>I spoke of a "disconnect" between the critic and the artist, but that was not meant to be abusive of the views of the critic. The critic of whom I spoke in my example, Michel Bois, who works in Montreal and Quebec City, is a very perceptive analyst and writer (also artist), and one who has promoted art and artists at a time when many critics shun most exhibitions that are not within the cherished boundaries of the currently popular "installation art".</p>

<p>The "disconnect" I was speaking of is not a value judgement on the critique, but rather something that is due in part to the fact that artists, or those striving to produce art, are not always aware of the results or the effect of their work on others, on the public. His description of one artist as being "tragic" (I am simplifying his comment here and not really placing it in context) in her painting was unexpected, but likely correct.</p>

<p>The value of that critique is that it can clarify in the mind of the artist some aspects of her work that can serve her in future. She has chosen, however, to move away from the enigmatic and tragic elements to a different approach, but may well re-invent some day her former approach. Michel's critique of my images centered on those concerned with decaying nature or constructions of man and he saw analogies with certain events or considerations of being. I probably don't fully understand his personal interpretation, and have not seen him since, but I have decided to not forget it and to use it as some form of indicator or measure of sorts in my further photographic approaches. </p>

<p>Perhaps if one is not intent on conveying a message, a critic is less important (in which case the critic might be communicating something about the subject matter or the "transparency" with which it was photographed, and not the message of the photographer), but for those intent on a "message" (whether that be purely aesthetic or engaging of human values) in their work or art, which for me is the very nature of what IS art, the interpretation of another is valuable. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>Fred, a really excellent work on seeing is that of the Nova Scotian photographer, Freeman Patterson, circa 1979 or 80, "The art of seeing". It effectively combines the practical with the philosophical, whereas many texts do mainly one (e.g., Sontag) or the other.</p>

<p><em>"<strong> </strong>Obviously, if one photographs a rock or girlfriend or flower one is rarely making "art". One is merely making nothing much. But one can sometimes make a little bit of art that way (Picasso did, Stieglitz did, have you? I don't think I have)."</em> -- John Kelly</p>

<p><em>"Some photographers don't need the "art" crutch, some do. . . </em><em>Quite a lot of photography transcends art."</em> -- John Kelly</p>

<p>-----------------</p>

<p>"<em>If the intention...was to make art...then <strong>who's to say</strong> that the resulting image is not "art"? You?" </em>-- Ernest B.</p>

<p><em>"Yes, me. You do understand."</em> -- John Kelly</p>

<p>-----------------</p>

<p>No, John, I don't.</p>

<p>In your world of rarified, implied-not-stated (and mixed-up-in-my-opinion) definitions, if the labels ("certified by John" -- like one of those little gold JCI stickers, "CBJ") were to be peeled off of the "little bit" of Picasso's and Stieglitz's creative output that you're willing to vouch for, could you articulate in plain English what distinguishes their "art" output from their non-"art" creative output?</p>

<p>And notwithstanding your view that, in photographing common subjects, "one is rarely making art", you also hold that "quite a lot of photography transcends art"?</p>

<p>Your intended meaning(s) seem to be neither consistent, nor intuitively obvious.</p>

<p>"In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation." --- SS<br /> </p>

<p>We are an interpreting form of life. Every second of every waking day our brains are constantly interpreting incoming bits of data into a coherent sequence that allows us to survive. What we think of as "the way things are" is already an interpretation.</p>

<p>Arthur, the point I was trying to make is that what <em>La Sontag </em>proposes in that article was made at a very specific set of timespace coordinates, basically when Post Modernism broke through the ice on a large scale. In order to push beyond the stranglehold Modernism had on art <em>at the time</em>, it was essential to break out of the rigid exoskeleton of the critical thinking of the time.</p>

<p>________________________________________________</p>

<p>I was talking with a real-estate mogul at a party here recently, and she told me how she wants to "save" a popular neon sign from a building she's demolishing and replacing with a much larger one. She asked me what I thought of moving it to the rear of the building (out of sight from the street) and redoing the name on it to the name of her company. I said something about how renaming the sign would partially take away from its authenticity, and in a bit of defiance, she said she was going to do it anyway (so, why ask me in the first place?), <em>and "I am going to call it art". </em></p>

<p>Anyone can call anything art. How that plays out in the art world is another thing.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Fred Goldsmith wrote:</p>

<p><em>"Ernest, I hope making art is more than the declaration, 'This is art.'</em></p>

<p><em>"Art is, at least in part, craft. Cabinetmakers don't make a cabinet by looking at a few pieces of wood and declaring them to be a cabinet. Who's to say it is or is not a cabinet? Well, these things are decided all the time. Who's to say indeed? That it's a tough question to answer doesn't mean everything someone says is a cabinet is a cabinet.</em></p>

<p><em>"I agree with you, Ernest, that there is good and bad art. And the same reasoning leads me to the conclusion that there is also art and non-art."</em></p>

<p>--------------------------</p>

<p>Fred, I don't think our points of view in this case are very far apart.</p>

<p>But I would note that "making a cabinet" (or any other objectively-defined, material object) is different from "making art". Even the harshest critic of a piece of cabinetry would be far more likely to say: "That's the worst cabinet I've ever seen," than to say: "That's not a cabinet." (Does the item in question have a top, bottom, sides, drawers, shelves?)</p>

<p>When speaking of "art", on the other hand, there are no such clear-cut parameters. Within the subset of painting, examples of photorealism, abstract expressionism, impressionism, etc., etc., now qualify for the label of "art"; yet virtually all stylistic innovators have been dismissed (by those who disliked what they were doing) for producing things that were deemed to be (at the time, according to prevailing standards) "not art".</p>

<p>So what is the determining criterion between "making art" (photographs included) and "making non-art", assuming the intentions of the makers are equally serious, and equally sincere?</p>

<p>Is it simply "quality"?</p>

<p>In any field, including photography-as-art, the quality of the average created work will be (drum roll)..."average". 49.9999% of all photographs will be "below average", while 49.9999% will be "above average". (And no matter how high the bar may be raised, or with what exclusivity the "CBJ" stickers may be applied, 99% of all "accepted-as-art" works will fail to be in the top 1% of that category.)</p>

<p>Perhaps we would dismiss as "not art", the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira--if we had full knowledge of the higher achievements of contemporary cave-painters, now lost to us. <em>"How pretentious,"</em> we might say of the Lascaux depictions. <em>"How mediocre," "definitely in the lower 49.9999% of strivers"</em>. Thus: <em>"Not art."</em></p>

<p>Such an approach makes me uneasy, whether applied to cave paintings or to Photo.net portfolios. I would prefer a definition of "art" similar to that of Merriam-Webster:</p>

<p><em>"the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also <strong>:</strong> works so produced"</em></p>

<p> </p>

<p><em>"Perhaps we would dismiss as "not art", the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira--if we had full knowledge of the higher achievements of contemporary cave-painters, now lost to us. "How pretentious," we might say of the Lascaux depictions. "How mediocre," "definitely in the lower 49.9999% of strivers". Thus: Not art."</em><br /><em> </em><br />The primary way one could diminish the significance of the work at Lascaux would be to reduce it to "art" , failing to be struck by the several levels of perceptual and rendition skill (eg regarding leg articulation) and the awareness of animal behavior and overt human emotions (terror, lust).</p>

<p>I agree with those who think "art" is a nearly-magical characteristic. I don't agree with people who dumb-down the term by using it for refrigerator magnets, high school football, and student plays..or snaps of flowers, kitty kats etc. I think the word has to do with significance, most simply use it for feel-good.</p>

<p>Someone who hadn't looked a little seriously into Lascaux (books, film, website, peripheral comment) might feel content reducing it to "art," but does that label add to appreciation of the works, or does it perhaps reduce appreciation, <strong>lumping it with refrigerator magnets</strong> ? (as in this thread).</p>

<p>What I've seen of Lascaux (reproduction, film, anthro discussion, human language related meditations) indicates tremendous <strong>significance</strong>.</p>

<p>As a final (maybe) comment, I think one of the best things we can do in these discussions is to inspire discomfort, raise questions. While there is something to be said for clicking one's heels and buying into popular ideas, there may still be some value in expression of one's own ideas.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Ernest, I'm going to avoid any discussion of what is art. I really just don't want to go there.</p>

<p><em>"I agree with those who think 'art' is a nearly-magical characteristic."</em> -- John Kelly</p>

<p>Fine. </p>

<p>But it may be difficult to maintain a balanced dialogue, when the words being used are freighted (for one or more participants) with "magical" meanings. </p>

<p>Within a like-minded coven, if such a group exists, it may work well.<br>

<em><br /></em></p>

<p>Luis's perspective is interesting, but I think Ms. Sontag's ideas stand on their own, history aside. Ideas do not necessarily move "ahead," except perhaps in the world of refrigerator magnets.</p>

<p>A micro-short-term NYC "art" movement/theory perspective can be charming, but it seems to me that Ms. Sontag is a dead contemporary, not someone who wrote forgettably from ancient times.</p>

<p>We don't need to agree with her (I do, pretty much), but perhaps those of us who are interested in the <strong>perils </strong>of interpetation , such as those who have recently attended to Nissam Taleb (Black Swan) will see a connection. </p>

<p>Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf (who's afraid of living life without false illusions)?" is rather like who's afraid of the term art?".</p>

<p>It ain't all that difficult a concept. If it doesn't suit a classicist in the early 19th looking at Turner's paintings, or later vis-à-vis the Impressionists, for historic example, who cares? </p>

<p>If it inspires, accept it. If not, reject it. "Don't worry, be happy" </p>