Can Art be a Goal or is Art what we call Work that Sustains our Interest?

mizore · October 29, 2009

The problem with Flickr is...just now, I searched for "North Carolina". In the first five hits, there were single folders with 285, 225, 327, 604, 680+, and 1027 images in them. Yes, I know it's allowed , and that people are entitled to use up all the bandwidth they can afford, but it's not conducive to viewing or searching, because one has to wade through a lot of haystacks, never mind hay, for every needle. It has nothing whatsoever to do with affecting/controlling their taste.

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I assume that people who have folders with that many images in them won't be all that interesting since they haven't done the full work. I also think the Flickr works if you're reading a few subscribed people, not trying to use it as a museum/generic image access file. Think of Flickr as works in progress, trials, the slate slabs that people learned to paint on, and not every Paleolithic painter had work reproduced in the coffee table Paleolithic Art books.

Flickr is too impossibly big to be edited by anyone. Most people want to shoot the shots that are formalistic, which are important only to their families. I''m more likely to look around photo.net for things to look at than on Flickr outside the people I'm subscribed to.

Norma Desmond · October 29, 2009

I found a lot of benefit in the parts of this thread that came through the personalizing of the subject, when it was about the people who are artists, and about goals, not the label per se. The tie to my coming out was a discovery prompted by Rebecca's question, an exploration of me and my relationship to what I do.

A discussion about labels seems a bit distanced and a bit easy. It's a little bit of a disappointment to me.

Is a discussion about labels actually accomplishing the very same negative things that labels themselves can do? Do we risk staying on the surface and being superficial by not going beyond "I use labels"/"I don't use labels" and not revealing something about who we are (or who we are becoming or what we're doing)?

The question at the top of the page was "Can art be a goal?" Is there a way we can answer that without worrying too much about the label? Can we give to that question? Or are we indeed suffocated by it?

fate_faith_change_chains · October 29, 2009

"...and not revealing something about who we are (or who we are becoming or what we're doing)?"

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I wouldn't know how to put into words who I am, what I might become and what I'm doing. I doubt I'll know how to at 50. Label me clueless ! And I can't talk about what I'm doing photographically in this context. If I could I would be a writer or a poet, something else then what I am right now. Art can be a goal as much as contemplating the universe can be a goal. It's a goal that doesn't neccesarily has an end or a destination in sight, no problem as both can sustain my interest endlessly.

mizore · October 29, 2009

A lot of things like jazz and science fiction and some poetry are kinds of discussions where people are playing off each other, using something of common forms, and trying to extend the emotional and intellectual range of what the art (in the non-evaluative sense) can do. Documentation was previously part of what painting and drawing did; we call the people who draw from eye-witness descriptions police artists, but we don't generally look at what they do other than as visual information.

Photography has taken over most of the role of documenting things visually, so that's one use of photography. If we're not just about the documentation, then the photograph has to have other goals that are more emotional or about visual perception. Art is about the form more than the documentation -- can we live with that? I don't know if escaping visual documentation is totally useful -- it's part of what a photograph is, it's a way to move the audience along with the pleasure of geometry, visual surprise or delight.

If it's just the visual documentation, perhaps it's not intended as art, but can be art (not simply the sum of its identifiable images) if the photographer was sensitive to other factors at play in a photographic composition.

As a goal, using a photograph to try to engage something more than simple visual recognition of an object seems pretty obvious. Even the visual recognition of the objects can contribute to the overall impact of a photograph.

Is that a possible definition where the goal would be to actually take a photo that does more with the medium than creating a visual memory device?

luis_g · October 30, 2009

[Rebecca B] " A lot of things like jazz and science fiction and some poetry are kinds of discussions where people are playing off each other, using something of common forms, and trying to extend the emotional and intellectual range of what the art (in the non-evaluative sense) can do."

The same exact thing happens in many kinds of human activity, including Photography, and there's plenty of exchanges, and hybridization.

[RB] " Documentation was previously part of what painting and drawing did; we call the people who draw from eye-witness descriptions police artists, but we don't generally look at what they do other than as visual information."

History and genealogy (forms of documentation) were the realms of song and poetry. In some cultures, they also serve as instructional documents for performing various tasks (hunting, cooking, etc). Art was the first form of human communications/consciousness encoded outside the body.

Video has taken over the role of documentation. I would not roll with the idea that form rules over content in art. There's usually a tension between the two, but it's not as simple as A>B. Snapshots are mnemonic fetishes.

[RB] " Is that a possible definition where the goal would be to actually take a photo that does more with the medium than creating a visual memory device?"

Here's the problem with your persistent "goal" idea: Games have goals. Art is not a game. In a game we have a repetitive, clearly defined method of achieving goals/points and it adds up to 'winning'. In art, there is no such thing. While one can set personal goals for their own art, the idea of a universal condition or set(s) of actions, that if performed guarantees "art" is absurd. Besides, no one but a few (1/2 as many as post pictures of themselves on the john!) worry about whether it's art or not, but whether it's good or not.

mizore · October 30, 2009

Here's the problem with your persistent "goal" idea: Games have goals. Art is not a game. In a game we have a repetitive, clearly defined method of achieving goals/points and it adds up to 'winning'. In art, there is no such thing. While one can set personal goals for their own art, the idea of a universal condition or set(s) of actions, that if performed guarantees "art" is absurd. Besides, no one but a few (1/2 as many as post pictures of themselves on the john!) worry about whether it's art or not, but whether it's good or not.

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I think I've been more in agreement with you than not on this. In English Departments, things that are more about entertainment than anything else are not literature, but trying to write things that are not entertaining formal stories (beginning middle end) can mean becoming quite boring. If a person is relying on being superb at intellectual challenges, they do need the IQ to be up there. If they're playing with startling juxtapositions, that's not going to be all that successful without a creative mind. Knock offs of Kafka or Borges are not particularly startling.

If we get into questions of "what is good," I think the only way to go is to do what I think is good, learn more of what I think is necessary, and let the work take care of itself with any larger audience.

The word "art" can be a couple of things. One is art in the sense of drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, ray-traced and other computer graphics -- with writing and music being kin but outside. The other is art is something done for emotional pleasure, for beauty, for certain kinds of intellectual excitement -- a bridge can be beautiful but beauty isn't necessarily why it's built. Using beautiful natural objects in photographs or paintings doesn't necessarily make for interesting photographs. When I'm up in the mountains, I watch people shooting the Shenandoah Valley with their cell phones and wonder what in the world do they expect to take home with them (other than the mnemonic fetishes, as you say).

They're not going to look like the mountains look in RL; they're not generally going to be interesting photographs as photographs (much easier to take interesting portraits of people than interesting landscape photographs, at least for me, and I like Fred's photography of people better than his photographs without people). Julie's birds live in some form of the Uncanny Valley, unsettling not real.

There's some evidence that scientific and mathmatical observations were also encoded outside the human body very early (Marshak wrote about that, if I'm remembering correctly, the book is at home).

Defining what's good is to either accept Plato or run out of the building screaming, I think. In most things that we can categorize as art in the non-game, non-food, shelter, body covering sense, what's considered good seems to be a moving target and more than a little culturally framed. We're rooted in our cultures (family and higher levels of cultures) even though we may seriously want to correct them, challenge them, or explore them more deeply. And most of our cultures have generally accepted ideas about what's good (at one time, before cameras, likeness was important in Western drawing and painting as a basic core competency).

In most fields, people have an early stage where what they do is good because they do it. For anything I've done or seen done, people have to get beyond that stage to improve. Thinking about it, there has to be a fruitful tension between objectivity and hope to continue to work at doing things better. The eye/mind has to become educated (formally, informally, intuitively, organically) and to hope for better work to come to keep getting better.

Some people get jammed at the early stage (I am creating this so it must be good). Other people become jammed at becoming reasonably competent and start repeating what worked before or quit because they have no hope of getting better.

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luis_g · October 30, 2009

Imitative work/knock offs, no matter how great the source, are dull, particularly to an educated viewer. Unless one makes it their own (and no longer a knock-off) somehow, and/or adds, subtracts, reinterprets, recontextualizes it, they are weak or at best, a good copy.

[RB]- " Defining what's good is to either accept Plato or run out of the building screaming, I think."

Let's do neither. Put Philosophy aside for a minute. How do we know when a work (and not just a photograph or even art) is good? And I don't mean a crystallized, caged, definitive, rigorously mortified definition, but a real-world, imperfect, breathing, flexible, living, evolving one.

We can start with what Patrick said about the only opinions on his art he respects: "other artists I respect".

What are other ways we can tell a work is good?

I still disagree with RB's duality in the meaning of the a-word.

[RB] - " When I'm up in the mountains, I watch people shooting the Shenandoah Valley with their cell phones and wonder what in the world do they expect to take home with them (other than the mnemonic fetishes, as you say)."

Any camera (and printer, for that matter) can be used to make art. These categories people impose (specially on PN), or formulae as to what is 'required' to make art, and other unfounded assumptions, take us back to the signifier quagmire and the egos of the people making the comments.

Remember the Diana? Lomo? Holga? Pinhole cams? No camera? In the right hands all are eminently capable of producing perfectly viable works of art. Here's a few examples:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18824759/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/readers-3/

http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=PY296&i=&i2=&CFID=5354688&CFTOKEN=68032229

http://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2009/05/michal-daniel-in-your-face/

[RB] - " They're not going to look like the mountains look in RL"

Nor do they when photographed with a 16x20 banquet camera. Cameras do not see like the eye does.

[RB] " they're not generally going to be interesting photographs as photographs

Unfounded assumption. Don't be so sure. They might be more interesting than anything any of us here will ever make.

[RB] " (much easier to take interesting portraits of people than interesting landscape photographs, at least for me,"

If that were true, and I don't think it is, why would one take the 'easy' path?

I also read Alexander Marshack's fascinating book and NG article. The records of moon phases, etc were to me like notes, or notches (literally) of kills. The engraved animals were closer to Art & encoded psychic energies that in my opinion, transcended mere bookeeping. And there's far older art than what he was working on, some abstract, some figurative. A few things date back to .25 - .7m BC.

Loved the Freudian theory of the development of goodness.

fate_faith_change_chains · October 30, 2009

In the right hands all are eminently capable of producing perfectly viable works of art. Here's a few examples:

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<a href="http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/readers-3/">http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/readers-3/</a>

Luis, to me Pink Floyd, to pick an example, is a work of art. As evidenced in the entire scope and conceptual continuity of their produced music. A collection ( collection, in contrast to production ) of great songs or music made with cellphones ( which is also perfectly possible ) and made by many different individuals = a collection of great songs or music made with cellphones by many different individuals. Just like the link showing great and compelling pictures made with cellphones is a link that shows :great compelling pictures made with cellphones, by many different individuals. The link doesn't exclude the possibility of cellphones being capable of producing perfectly viable works of art ( why not security cams, should and could be as equally capable ), but the link isn't necessarily showing it to me either. So I don't see the logic in this context to elevate anything and everything beyond what it is as the premise for defending the democracy of art. It's as unreliable as claiming to proof the opposite, that art is only for the elite.

mizore · October 30, 2009

RB] - " When I'm up in the mountains, I watch people shooting the Shenandoah Valley with their cell phones and wonder what in the world do they expect to take home with them (other than the mnemonic fetishes, as you say)."

Any camera (and printer, for that matter) can be used to make art. These categories people impose (specially on PN), or formulae as to what is 'required' to make art, and other unfounded assumptions, take us back to the signifier quagmire and the egos of the people making the comments.

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Well, yeah, but I watch their faces when they chimp. They're not looking too happy. Good photographs can be taken in the mountains with any camera, but they seem to work better when they're about the photograph rather than about the mountains.

What the naive photographer thinks is happening is taking away something that looks like the mountain. The Blue Ridge under most summer conditions tricks cameras, tricks the eye on vista shots. We map in mentally what we know is in the slight mist, but the camera can't pull that trick off.

That's an "at least for me." Took me a while to have the nerve to photograph people.

The ego is not a bad thing as long as we realize other people also have egos.

The English department folks thought that if I were writing s.f., I couldn't be writing literature. At best, it was a popular culture phenomenon worthy of study as a separate thing than literature, or almost literature (I had a friend among the adjuncts who didn't feel like this was a reasonable description).

At least here, we're not trading in that distinction, which I find to be a relief. Any form can produce art; not all attempts to transcend the form actually succeed.

I guess someone could drag Art and Fear in at this point, so I'll do it.

I'm afraid of what happens if I commit to photography seriously. I think this is somewhat like Fred's comment about coming out as an artist. SF was the closest I had to real world success -- and some people sneered at that because of their own cultural associations, or simply couldn't read it (had no experience with decoding texts like that would be how Samuel R. Delany would have described it). I have no problem with the people who can't read it; I have serious reservations about the taste of people who refused to consider reading it (what were they afraid of, that they might like it?)

I sometimes think that both people who insist that they're artists and people who insist that they're photographers, writers, portrait painters, etc. are perhaps ignoring the that doing work requires some of both.

Norma Desmond · October 30, 2009

"Good photographs can be taken in the mountains with any camera, but they seem to work better when they're about the photograph rather than about the mountains." --Rebecca

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Yeah, but good snapshots, good scrapbook keeps, good stuff to show the aunts and uncles at Thanksgiving work better when they're about the mountains.

A lot of my pics are about memories, places I've been, people I've loved. I have a series of photographs of a dear friend, someone who was born in the building next door to me, a guy I grew up with, went through school with, college, moved to San Francisco with. We were like brothers. These pics were taken with an instamatic, I'm sure in a drug-induced haze. They have a totally pink cast to them, they're all curled up, a little water stained, blurry. He died when we were in our late twenties. Believe me, my heart is moved when I look at them not because they're about the photograph but because they're about Greg, and they're about me and Greg.

See, that's the thing. Back in those days taking a snapshot was taking a snapshot. I didn't have the Internet or PN convincing me that the photograph mattered. I didn't chimp. I accepted what I got back from the drugstore as the best I could get because I didn't even think about getting anything better. That's the magnificence of the true snapshot. It's all heart.

Those mountains may be a little disappointing because they've been shown better in the ads, but once they get them home and into the scrapbook, they will suffice. They're not hanging on any walls. They're "keepsakes." And they will work just fine as keepsakes. Remember when we were there, honey. What year was that? How old were the kids? What was the name of that lady who owned the motel where we stayed? It's about ALL THAT.

I may take offense if someone likens a photo of mine to a snapshot, just like you may take offense if someone says you're not writing literature. But I may not, because I realize the truth in the statement (and reject the judgment as just that, a judgment and not a truth). I take heart in knowing that, even though they may mean a negative judgment by it, I know better. I know the good side of the snapshot and that's OK. I know the spontaneity and heart a snapshot conveys. You know the down side of "lit-ra-ture" (said with an upturned nose and a haughty British accent) and so the put down is really an acknowledgment of something significant and true for you. It's only the judgment that stings but that's just like the bully calling you names in the schoolyard. I learned quickly that it was the bullies that were the morons. That's why I will relish the 4/4 rating from the PN folks when I've done something a bit different or a bit beyond what the mainstream prefers. It may tell me it won't sell here, but it may also tell me I'm an individual with a vision. Either that, or I'm totally kidding myself. There's always that possibility. I can let that crap stifle me or I can evolve and smile past it.

mizore · October 31, 2009

I wish someone had kept my early snapshots or the negatives. I never seen any of them in recent years except two (my mom probably threw them away when I moved to NYC). I sometimes wonder if the girls who paid me fifty cents to a dollar in 1966 kept them.

Getting the 3 to 7 spread on the snapping turtle under water was enlightening.

I've got cameras good enough for anything, not that I wouldn't mind having another 4x5 view camera. I did a lot of gear geeking until I realized I had enough, then started thinking about what to do with it. Sharp isn't sufficient in and off itself.

The people who are happy with the point and shoots and phone cams aren't the people whose faces are showing disappointment with what they're looking at.

And then there's this guy, who I suspect enjoyed what he was taking.

The problems with a lot of people and art is that they don't think they can do it. The myth of talent, innate ability, stops more people than the lack of capacity to do things.<div></div>

Norma Desmond · October 31, 2009

"The problems with a lot of people and art is that they don't think they can do it. The myth of talent, innate ability, stops more people than the lack of capacity to do things." --Rebecca

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I think a lot of people can't do it. It's hard. It takes dedication. Learning. Focus. Passion. Being exposed. It can be a lot more draining than my 9-5 job was because I don't stop. But the drain is exhilarating, too. Consider that a lot of people don't want to do it.

Most of the people taking pictures of the mountain who are disappointed because they're photo isn't that good just want a better photo. It's got zero to do with art for most of them. Most of them don't even think about art. They think they just don't know how to use the camera right. And, of the many of them who think they could make art if they just learned the right settings or had a better camera, many are fooling themselves. We said that art has to be declared or come about by context, but we didn't say that declaring art makes it so and we didn't say that a desire to do art makes it easy or possible.

Tell Mozart that talent and innate ability are myths. Hell, tell Salieri! Of course, learning your craft and honing your skill are also mighty important. Even Wolfie did finger exercises, practiced scales, and studied harmony.

luis_g · October 31, 2009

Phylo , cell phones aren't capable of anything unless someone makes them do it. What surveillance cameras do is no more art than the Grand Canyon is. What I wrote was that almost any tool can be used to make art. That looking at tools as signifiers of what can produce art or can't, the manufacturer's wet dream that we so frequently see on PN is generally unproductive. The other links should have showed you what you're talking about. The Lens link I threw in to show that lots of people do good work with their phones. Pink Floyd used a ring tone in at least one of their songs, but I'm sure you know that.

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[Rebecca Brown] "I guess someone could drag Art and Fear in at this point, so I'll do it."

Have you read the book? I think you might find it interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaking/dp/0961454733

[RB] - " I'm afraid of what happens if I commit to photography seriously."

Risk. Growth. Ecstasies and agonies. Flatline, Sargasso Sea days. Falling flat on your face, getting up, and going on. The usual human marvels, terrors, etc. The best part is that you don't know exactly what's going to happen. If you did, it wouldn't be as exciting -- or scary. Commitment is like that, isn't it?

Or is it because of the earlier trauma in the English department & SF? That what you encountered there may repeat? It could. Or something similar, infinitely better, or worse. That's life.

[RB] - " I sometimes think that both people who insist that they're artists and people who insist that they're photographers, writers, portrait painters, etc. are perhaps ignoring the that doing work requires some of both."

Believe it or not, a lot of people do not view the two as mutually exclusive.

Fred - " I can let that crap stifle me or I can evolve and smile past it."

Amen.

mizore · October 31, 2009

Luis, Art and Fear is my brother's bible, so yeah, I've read it. I'm 61 -- starting over now is a race against brain biology (my mom began losing it in her late 70s).

Fred, Mozart was born into a musical family, like Picasso was born into an artistic family. Both had something more than usual there, but I think one of the traps our culture has is assuming that innate talent is all there is, that if you're not a genius, get on with a real job. I've also met people who believed that if a person was a good poet, that person was in academia (most of the people I knew in NYC are now). I even had a tenured woman poet tell me that if I'd worked at it as hard as she did, I could have had a life like hers. I didn't think fast enough to say that if I really had worked at it, I could have had a life like Patti Smith's which would have been much more entertaining and much more fun.

Salieri wasn't a failure; he just wasn't as good as Mozart. Should he have become a lawyer instead? This is our time's trap, that we must be extraordinary to justify being in the arts -- and it's probably more a provincial/lower middle class/middle class belief, but if doing art is a way of thinking, which I kinda think it is, then doing art is of value to everyone. Not all the country fiddlers in my father's home county became four times champion at Union Grove Fiddling Contest, but one did, and most of the people played their style of music well. The guy who was four times champion at Union Grove ran a short class at one of the local arts centers and told the students that you had your fingering down by twelve, the rest of it was showmanship. Would that be remotely true in urban America where there weren't uncles and fathers who played?

I even wonder if the idea of being really good or getting out doesn't create all the imitations of more famous work, the imitations of Ezra Pound or the Surrealist in poetry, the imitations of generic fashion photography or the imitations of Raymond Carver or Beckett in MFA programs in Creative Writing. The snapshots don't have that problem, and so can be more fun than the more labored self-concious stuff.

Lots to think about. Exercising the mind.

The Chinese upper classes painted with brushes that shaped what people did more than western brushes were designed to do (and people apparently did care about which brush and had brushes made with exotic materials -- I've seen modern jade handed brushes, so an analogy to camera geeking is there if you want it). They were distinct from professional painters who did a different style of painting. The paintings they did were often of traditional subjects handled in traditional ways. The point wasn't to create masterpieces but to do painting. When a culture has a lot of people doing painting or music, the overall quality tends to be higher than when most people never touch the stuff and only people with "real" talent are encouraged to continue.

I saw at sixteen that I couldn't draw as well as Picasso did at that age without really understanding all the sociiological baggage of that decision, or the advantages of having an art teacher father, or the problem with wanting to be guaranteed that doing art required being one of the most successful artists of the century, or the difficulties a woman might have in being taken seriously in South Carolina in the 1960s). People can do science without having to feel that either one is really successful or a fraud. People can knit without having to measure themselves against Kaffee Fawcett. I knew a woman in Charlotte who designed and sewed her own clothes, did a good job of it, cared about it, but wasn't planning to become a dress designer for a living.

Norma Desmond · October 31, 2009

"This is our time's trap, that we must be extraordinary to justify being in the arts" --Rebecca

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Rebecca--

To be honest, it sounds like you have fallen into a trap and are blaming it on the times, on academia, etc. Do you have your own part in this? I understand you've had some bad experiences, but it keeps sounding like you're letting others, especially the bullies, define you.

Though I like to do good work, I don't set out to create a masterpiece every time. I'm much more interested in having a body of work that expresses something significant. I know full well I'm not Picasso or Bill Brandt. I have found my little niche and I'm sticking to it. Going beyond that may or may not be gravy. This is about Fred, not about Pablo or Wolfgang.

I used Mozart and Salieri as examples of innate talent and lack, not as examples of someone who should continue and someone who should give up. If Salieri wants to keep making music, more power to him. Whether or not he creates art, however, will not solely be up to him to declare. Same for Mozart. At a certain point, the art is in the Mozart Mass, it's in the G minor Symphony and the string quartets. It's not in your hands, my hands, academia's hands, or Wikipedia's hands. We are just vessels who experience the art that is the music through the ages.

As for snapshots not being self conscious or labored, I agree. Art doesn't have to be self consciousness (if self consciousness is taken to be more about preoccupation than mind expansion) but good artists often seem to be self aware. I'm sure some great art is born out of self consciousness as well, though often self consciousness will lead more to kitsch or false dramatics. Snapshots are not belabored and don't appear belabored. Good art may be quite labored but won't necessarily appear labored. The Sistine Chapel gives me a sense of a great amount of labor having gone into it yet doesn't feel labored. Snapshots may have qualities I may imbue in my own photos. But it's rare that I want someone else's snapshot framed and hanging on my wall, though it can occur. I think I have to find for myself that right combination of what makes a snapshot great and why someone who wasn't on vacation with me would want to bother looking. That will allow me to make photos or art that will express something to someone else and communicate to them. On the other hand, I can make my art just for me and never even consider a viewer's actually looking at them. Maybe it'll be discovered by a future generation and maybe not. Maybe I just want to or have to do it for the sake of doing it.

You mention the possibility of being influenced by other work, or even imitating other work, for the sake of being good. The reason I am influenced by other work is because I love it and find challenges in it. Some styles just make me want to own them in my own way. Sometimes I just want to thank another artist by imitating him. I usually give it something of myself rather than making an exact copy. I see nothing wrong in "improvement" or "being good at what I do" and sometimes imitating someone can help both with my craft and in developing my own vision. When the goal seems to be just being good, a trap I can fall into at times, I just remind myself what a distraction it is. I work with all kinds of white noise and distractions tugging for my attention all the time. Dogs bark outside my window, buses go by, friends want to go out and play, crappy TV shows I get drawn to. . . . Nothing inherently bad about wanting to be good at something, except maybe when it become its own raison d'être.

Academia is a place where we get graded. We get graded in lots of places in life. PN has bought into that crap by having a "ratings" system. One wants to hang in a gallery, one plays a game or gets a good agent or has a whole lot of talent or luck or knows the right people, whatever. Want to make art? There's nothing I gotta do except learn a craft, express myself, and maybe communicate with someone through my medium. All the other stuff is society's baggage.

Like I said, I buy into that baggage to a certain extent (there are some truly free people, some bohemians as it were, rare birds) and occasionally suffer my own version of that internalized homophobia I talked about. Internalized homophobia and how I deal with it can even be one of those passions that helps make my art. Or I can hide under the covers with it. "The idea of being really good" sounds very much like internalized homophobia. Something with the potential to make me feel less than. I'd either ignore it or put it to good internal use, let it feed my passion. I wouldn't let 'em win.

And to those who want to have fun taking snapshots, more power to them. Like I said, art isn't and shouldn't be for everyone. It's not always fun and it's not easy.

luis_g · October 31, 2009

[Rebecca B]- "I think one of the traps our culture has is assuming that innate talent is all there is, that if you're not a genius, get on with a real job."

Look at the PN galleries. Many of the pro galleries show technically professional-looking just above average work. Such a photographer, if s/he has works like a dog, has strong marketing skills, and is sensitive to market wants, can make a decent living. Genius is not required. Business savvy is. Real genius is, by definition extreme and unstable. It usually ends up either at the top, or at the other end, largely unnoticed.

Talent is real. I've taught and lectured from the grade-school level to college, and seen it first-hand several times. Many times it came from non-artist (but mostly creative) families, and often from adults and children who had never done art before. But at that point it is simply an indication of potential. Undeveloped, it soon freezes, fades away or becomes a parlor trick.

One of the great terrors and marvels of the world is that all people are not created equal.

[RB] - " I've also met people who believed that if a person was a good poet, that person was in academia"

If they want a steady decent income, some body fat, job security, good credit, retirement, and health insurance, and aren't entrepeneurs, there are worse roads to hoe.

Fred never said Salieri was a failure, or that he should have done something else. But Salieri knew he was in the presence of a monstrous talent, one capable of things on a daily basis he could not, and would not, ever imagine. There are many levels in the arts. I know people that make a viable living from doing the better sidewalk art show circuit. Do they produce top level work? No, nor do most claim to, though some do grow bitter as the reality of trajectory sets in. It is still an achievement.

I believe it is a lack of individuation (and all the other things that go with it) that traps people into imitative work. They adopt what they believe are signifers of greatness, misunderstanding the entire process.

Snapshots are very rigid aesthetically, but thankfully inconsistent, so now and then, often unbeknownst to its maker, great things happen. As I've reamarked here before, I have studied the snapshot to the point where I took a night job at a 1-hr lab near my home in order to be able to have access to innumerable contemporary snaps.

[RB] - "The point wasn't to create masterpieces but to do painting. When a culture has a lot of people doing painting or music, the overall quality tends to be higher than when most people never touch the stuff and only people with "real" talent are encouraged to continue."

Non egomaniacs don't set out to "create masterpieces". They're just pushing themselves, doing the best they can. I believe that doing any art or craft is of beneficial value.

Everyone blew it off, but a key concept that repeats often in RB's ruminations and is often skirted around, is the quality of the work. How do we know it's good? How does anyone know "real" talent?

[RB] - "...or the problem with wanting to be guaranteed that doing art required being one of the most successful artists of the century, or the difficulties a woman might have in being taken seriously in South Carolina in the 1960s)."

All those things are paralyzing, though some solutions/alternatives exist. One must do the work, and plow on, no matter what.

[RB] - People can do science without having to feel that either one is really successful or a fraud.

You can do anything without having to feel only the extremes of success or failure. It's a handy way to excise where 99% of everyone lives. The all or nothing at all thing. Great way to set yourself up for failure.

I've known, and know of, lots of photographers who did a good job of it, cared about it, but never planned to become a pro or give up the day job.

mizore · October 31, 2009

I agree with everything except the next to the last statement. Perhaps I've seen too many people fail to get the education they need to do what they want to do because they weren't considered to be people who would be among the artists. We're social creatures -- trying to fight the opinions of those around us isn't trivial. Much easier to be a country musician in Patrick County than in New York City. I knew one man who played professionally in NYC but moved back to Patrick because he didn't have a musical community there. Works in the Post Office, owns rental property. Another one of the local musicians ran a garage and gas station. Third ran a cafe. Music was just life to them.

Huge numbers of people in proportion to the population learned to play music reasonably well. Not all of them played as well as Turner Foddrell, Buddy Pendleton, or the guy at the Coffee Shop, but the good ones came out of a matrix that recruited as widely as possible.

I don't really follow country music, bluegrass, old timey, except when I'm there, but it was a revelation about how differently an art community could work. Nothing in that says that people aren't better or worse. None of them were making a living from music. All of them were living music. None of them played what a friend of mine calls "Big Hat Country."

Dunno if I can agree that art isn't and shouldn't be for everyone. We had a population of 14,000 in that county and I heard some very interesting music there. And two novelists who were published by commercial houses, and a painter as good as anyone at 17 who stopped showing people his work because they'd try to tell them what to do. He ran a lumber yard. People were born into the place; it wasn't like Bolinas for poets in the 1970s.

I think for those people, music was something that included them all in, even if only as listeners. Community, not identity. Art in most of the US is identity -- in Patrick, everyone listened to the local music except the people from away who were snobs about country music. One touring banjo group included an African banjo player, draw in the connections and traditions. In NYC, listening to country music is getting down with ones roots, something that makes one different from other New Yorkers.

Never had seen that before in what was otherwise a natural community that people didn't volunteer to belong to.

Pendleton took playing well seriously, but not making a living at it if it meant not being intelligently appreciated.

I don't know if this could apply to something like drawing, painting, or photography, or do we want to call art in music only musicians who write what they play?

This doesn't mean that everyone is equally good.

What I hated about the academic situation was getting dragged into the middle of a squabble about it instead of being allowed to just do the adjunct teaching and finish my novel and figure out where to do next. I agree with all of them, none of them, waah. Writer, not poet, not s.f. writer, not journalist, not tech writer -- those are ways of being a writer, not who I am.

Photographer? We'll see. What I want to learn next is to understand how we see photography, have a better understanding of the core principles, to understand what I'm seeing better.

Norma Desmond · October 31, 2009

"What I want to learn next is to understand how we see photography, have a better understanding of the core principles, to understand what I'm seeing better." --Rebecca

</blockquote>

Then let's talk about that!

mizore · October 31, 2009

I think that's a new topic. :).

Norma Desmond · October 31, 2009

It's a good idea, Rebecca. If you don't beat me to it, I'll start something on "seeing."

clive_murray_white · October 31, 2009

Can Art be a Goal or is Art what we call Work that Sustains our Interest?

To any of these kinds of questions there are always 4 reasonable and arguable answers. just put the words, either, or, neither, both into the question and drop the question mark.

I have been pondering this thread for a couple of days now as everything about it falls into my areas of expertise, I am an artist who takes photos but I'd never call my photos art, the photgraphy came into my activities simply as a way of documenting my sculpture. Until I plucked up courage to devote my life to making the best art I could I was head of a university art department.

And sadly much of the confusion is caused by Universities as people have constantly tried to apply some objectivity and therefore describe "art", and once some descripition has acheived a level of acceptance (however small) it is used as a precedent for the next wave of inquirers to extend.

Because someone (probably a very logical academic) came up with the bright idea that anybody could be an artist, and someone else said, "I am an artist so everything I do is art" -very popular with lazy art students - Art has been devalued. Furthermore the universal application of quasi academic rigour to the assessment of student work has meant that art is assessed on the quality of argument that it contains rather than on the quality of the art itself.

I suppose contributing this thread was accelerated last evening because I had a number of friends round for dinner, all connected with art, gallery director, curator, art exhibition touring administrator etc, and as is my way I took a few casual snaps of them.

All agreed and described the included picture as "ART" of course it isn't because I wont give it that title - but I have to acknowledge that if I changed my mind it could be.

I include it because it contains many of the very silly stereotypes that people generally like to attach to art. In essence its a lousy photo, histogram far too far to the left, looks very grungy and arty.

Just as people are keen to quote in against the idea that artists set out to make ART there are thousands of examples to show that they do.

All the best Clive

clive_murray_white · October 31, 2009