arkady n. Posted March 30, 2005 Share Posted March 30, 2005 I read a photography review recently and they had a following description of the photographer's works : "[photographer] deals in irony and detachment, still the dominant aesthetic responses of our time." It got me wondering, what are the other "aesthetic responses" of our time? Lets say that "our time" is mid-20th century up to now. Is that too broad of a time-frame? <br><br>As a secondary question, are these "responses" same for photographers, painters, sculptors, etc, or are they different?<br><br>I am looking forward to all your thoughts on this... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ellis_vener_photography Posted March 30, 2005 Share Posted March 30, 2005 <I>It got me wondering, what are the other "aesthetic responses" of our time?</I><P> Laziness, passivity, & television. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
._kaa Posted March 30, 2005 Share Posted March 30, 2005 You might want to browse through the long discussion of post-modernism in this forum (a few months back)... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul_watson1 Posted March 30, 2005 Share Posted March 30, 2005 Ellis, you forgot apathy and ignorance. But hey, I don't know and I don't care. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kai_griffin Posted March 30, 2005 Share Posted March 30, 2005 Xenophobia masquerading as patriotism. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tholte Posted March 30, 2005 Share Posted March 30, 2005 Angst, pure and simple. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ben conover Posted March 31, 2005 Share Posted March 31, 2005 Hi arkady n. These are my beginners thoughts on the subject of 'Aesthetic responses'. Photography is not always an aesthetic response, and it is not always art. A response usually follows a lead, as this response follows your lead question. So to ask what the dominant responses of our time are, one can first ask what the dominant lead has been in our time. The Dominant aesthetic response to Capitalism is Consumerism. Sell 50,000,000 cameras to people and you will have many more consumers. Is that art? Personally I find my own responses to this day and age to be changing and that is fine by me. To be stuck with one fixed lens and angle of view on life would to say the least, be very worrying. Sometimes a step backwards towards medium format film can enable high quality results, avoiding capitalistic issues and also providing the chance to make something worthy of the title art. Since people are quoted as 'dealing in irony and detachment, still the dominant aesthetic responses of our time', I found it amusing that the responses to your question were perhaps also ironic and detached! Cheers and all the best. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rich_ullsmith1 Posted March 31, 2005 Share Posted March 31, 2005 arkady, I gotta put "photography review" in the same round can as movie review, music review, book review, and performance review. Copy the comment on Consumerism being the dominant aesthetic response of our time. Is this response the same for painters? I dunno, that Thomas Kinkade is a heckuva painter. Not that irony and detachment are not prevalent in photography. It's just easier to capture irony and detachment than action and engagement, because they tend to sit still longer while I'm fiddling with an f-stop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ken_hughes4 Posted March 31, 2005 Share Posted March 31, 2005 "Xenophobia masquerading as patriotism" also masquerading as patriotism would be the following..... greed, hunger for power, stupidity.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
james_oneill Posted March 31, 2005 Share Posted March 31, 2005 <i>"Xenophobia masquerading as patriotism" <br> also masquerading as patriotism would be the following..... <br> <br> greed, hunger for power, stupidity...."</i><p> In Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's dictionary" there is this<p> <B>Patriotism</b><I>n.</i>Combustible rubbish ready for the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name<br> In Dr Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.<p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gary_watson Posted April 1, 2005 Share Posted April 1, 2005 Cynicism substituted for experience. Hypocrisy and self-justification being ignored or, worse still, celebrated. The alarming rise of superstitition and its widespread promotion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
admiralblur Posted April 1, 2005 Share Posted April 1, 2005 How about melodrama and sentimentality rolled up into repetitive, cliched substitutions for beauty? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wigwam jones Posted April 1, 2005 Share Posted April 1, 2005 <blockquote><i>Tim Holte , mar 30, 2005; 10:23 p.m. Angst, pure and simple.</blockquote></i> <p>Self-involvement masquerading as angst.</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Wiggy</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bacsa Posted April 2, 2005 Share Posted April 2, 2005 Separation between the (self)declared artists and the rest of the world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex_Es Posted April 2, 2005 Share Posted April 2, 2005 Arkady and Everyone, Critics like other people have to eat. In order to get the money to be able to afford doing that they have to meet deadlines whether or not they have anything worth saying. The quotation above, "[the photographer] deals in irony and detachment, still the dominant aesthetic responses of our time," is absolutely terrible writing. It is a vague string of words that have been taken from various cliches. It means absolutely nothing. It seems malapropistic. How does one "deal in" irony and detachment? I mean is it like "Going out of business; 50% off on irony and detachment this week"? This is meaningless writing. But I sympathize. Been there and done that--albeit never quite that badly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kai_griffin Posted April 2, 2005 Share Posted April 2, 2005 Alex, yes, I think you are absolutely right. The author is probably not long out of high school. Or, as my grandfather used to put it (and I'm paraphrasing here to be a little less crass than his version): "the author is passing wind higher than his posterior". Cheers, Kai Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terribletomterrific Posted April 2, 2005 Share Posted April 2, 2005 Hi, "Irony and detachment" is the dominant condition of our time, rather than the dominant aesthetic response: just like "L'Avventura," plus all the other films of Antonioni. In a word, "ennui," in another word, "boredom," or in the words of your question, "irony and detachment." The dominant aesthetic response to this condition is "consumerism." Buy, buy, buy--new cameras with more gigs, ipods with endlessly pounding music, faster cars, and embalming drugs--in order to reawaken our dead nerve endings with the meaningless stimulation of consumption, and give us a skelaton-like semblence of life. Capitalism. Oi weh!! Antonioni said it all. I'm gonna order "Blow-up" from Netflix right now. The question to me isn't so much what is our aesthetic response to ennui--I think I've answered that--but what are we missing? What are we displacing? That's a tougher question. Tom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matt_borengasser Posted April 4, 2005 Share Posted April 4, 2005 Dispite the critics BS criticism, I think the questions, "What are the dominant aesthetic responses of our time?" is a valid one that would be interesting to discuss (share ideas about). So...who's going to start a new post with the same question all over again? Me? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ben conover Posted April 4, 2005 Share Posted April 4, 2005 Hello again, I supposse that there really are millions of photographers who could respond to the question you ask, so I guess that a statistical analysis would provide you with an accurate idea to your question concernign what may have been a dominant aesthetic and the resulting responses, of our time. Why not write a paper on the subject. I agree with Mike Dixon that reposting is a little odd since many people did respond to your original thread. Nice to know your 'favoured' dominant aethetic responses. Here are my responses to your question, again. Hi arkady n. These are my beginners thoughts on the subject of 'Aesthetic responses'. Photography is not always an aesthetic response, and it is not always art. A response usually follows a lead, as this response follows your lead question. So to ask what the dominant responses of our time are, one can first ask what the dominant lead has been in our time. The Dominant aesthetic response to Capitalism is Consumerism. Sell 50,000,000 cameras to people and you will have many more consumers. Is that art? Personally I find my own responses to this day and age to be changing and that is fine by me. To be stuck with one fixed lens and angle of view on life would to say the least, be very worrying. Sometimes a step backwards towards medium format film can enable high quality results, avoiding capitalistic issues and also providing the chance to make something worthy of the title art. Since people are quoted as 'dealing in irony and detachment, still the dominant aesthetic responses of our time', I found it amusing that the responses to your question were perhaps also ironic and detached! Cheers and all the best. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Art ben conover , apr 04, 2005; 08:05 a.m. Hi, I read that you are a trained painter. I think that photography can be a direct aesthetic response to painting, or perhaps visa versa. Using photos for reference is interesting and having a visual history of art in your minds eye before shooting may also be interesting. I suppose that people are grappling with new forms of technology which may expand their awareness of aesthetic values, and also may not. So all that said I suppose that photography could even be one of the leading dominant aesthetic responses of our time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ellis_vener_photography Posted April 4, 2005 Share Posted April 4, 2005 Sloth, greed, and gluttony. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ben conover Posted April 5, 2005 Share Posted April 5, 2005 Religion Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jack_lo_..._t_o Posted April 16, 2005 Share Posted April 16, 2005 Lack of curiousity underlies most "esthetic responses" today. If it isn't handed to you, hooks as visible as Britney Spears' cleavage, then defined for you right away in case you have trouble seeing what you're buying, it's too much work for the "art consumer". An irony is that in the age of the net there is very little serious "browsing". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug Keller Posted May 2, 2005 Share Posted May 2, 2005 Sure, if one looks only at "high art" (which is where I think these kinds of questions are secretly focused), then yes one sees an odd narcissistic, detached, disconnected self-absorbtion. But, most art is the stuff that nobody notices, like TV shows and Pepsi ads. Whenever I look back at old-time art, I mean art created before, say... The Beatles... I see so much pseudo-aristocratic, high-handed, fascistic, hero-worship that I'm often tempted to drop to my knees and thank the God that I don't believe in (because I'm my own post-modern man, of course)... show my humble thanks to Him that I live in this fabulous oh-so-Spearian age -- Britney Spearian that is.... not Albert Speerian. We are all truly children of the revolution... and it IS being televised! :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred_bonnett2 Posted June 5, 2005 Share Posted June 5, 2005 Kia, James, etc.: How about naivet頭asquerading as enlightenment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred_bonnett2 Posted June 5, 2005 Share Posted June 5, 2005 retry Kia, James, etc.: How about naiveness masquerading as enlightenment Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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