How come Ansel Adams remains so popular while others are left in the dust?

[yockenwaithe]

<p>...unless you want your identity to remain a secret</p>

[Supriyo]

<blockquote>

<p>What I had in mind was whether the future generation will be able to understand and appreciate the art (even if the message is not relevant to their culture) without the associated media hype.<br /> </p>

</blockquote>

<p>Footnote to this ... When I said 'appreciate', I meant appreciation due to aesthetics, not due to purely historical value.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Supriyo, I didn't say and certainly didn't mean to imply that Liszt's music lacks depth or would not continue to appeal to future generations. I think it will maintain its appeal and deservedly so. What I said was that I don't find it has the depth or merit of Chopin, but it has plenty of depth and plenty of merit . . . and there are days when I love listening to Liszt!</p>

[donald_miller5]

<p>Then at this point it comes down to definition. What is art?I do not have much background but I have seen this question argued with various levels of intensity and have seen many argue my perception of art so maybe the answer lies with the most eloquent. Is it about communication? If so then celebrity ( based on definition} comes into play. You said yourself that you are interested in what will help you enhance your capabilities, but that is only possible if yu have access to what is diseminated. That is celebrity whether it is splashed alll over Life magazine or some obsure publication or posting that has come accross some gem that is not recgnized or appreciatesd. Communication still has to be through some form of media wherther it has a high profile or not. But maybe this question is not meant to have an answer buit to stimulate thought and maybe that is what art is supposed to do.</p>

[yockenwaithe]

<p>I think art [as by what is usually define it as], is aesthetic over function. Not to say it can't be used but it was not intended primarily to be used, but to be looked at</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Supriyo, by the way, thanks for clarifying a few of your points. I understand what you're saying.</p>

[Supriyo]

<blockquote>

<p>Supriyo, I didn't say and certainly didn't mean to imply that Liszt's music lacks depth or would not continue to appeal to future generations.</p>

</blockquote>

<p> <br>

Fred,<br>

My mistake. I realized you were talking in relative terms upon comparison with Chopin. My mistyping made it look like it is absolute and much more extreme than it was meant to be. Thanks for correcting me.</p>

[Supriyo]

<blockquote>

<p>Then at this point it comes down to definition. What is art? ... Is it about communication? If so then celebrity ( based on definition} comes into play.</p>

</blockquote>

<p><br /> Donald,<br /> Let me be clear about what I wanted to say. IMO, art is indeed about communication, but not any form of communication, but what gets disseminated through the art itself. That was what I meant to say. In my view, celebrity is more about the person, instead of the art, unless that celebrity is part of the art itself as in Warhol's case. When one splashes a photographer's photo (along with his portrait) across Life magazine, coffee mugs, mouse pads, tee shirts, it is a different form of communication than what is akin to the art itself. I just wanted to distinguish that communication from what one gets by looking at the photo only without the associated advertisement. Celebrity is not the kind of communication I would consider long lived for many art forms, although it could be interesting to study such short-term effects for social studies and history. Again for certain artists like Andy Warhol, the celebrity effect may be more eternally linked to his art and thus an essential part of the art-based communication.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>I think art can be a solitary pursuit and doesn't have to communicate. Communication suggests someone else will understand what is meant. Art doesn't always have that kind of transfer of meaning. So I think of art more as expression than communication. Someone telling me about their day and my understanding them is communication. Someone sighing is different. Much art is more like an expressive sigh writ large, or a series of sighs and gestures than it is like a diary entry detailing one's day.</p>

<p>It's hard to draw a line of distinction between where the art begins and where the person who made the art ends. Wrapped up in Adams's photos is Adams the man. The man who cared about the environment and who advocated for the national parks at a time when it was desperately needed. The man, along with Weston, about whom Bresson was misguidedly saying <em>"</em><em>The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!”</em> Bresson saw only the aesthetic in their work and missed the bigger and more important picture of what they were doing and what effect their aesthetics might have on the world. <br>

<br>

I think Adams had a function in mind even though he obviously also approached making photographs from a non-utilitarian standpoint. He could do both, as so many good artists can. There's a sense of non-utilitarian appreciation even when there's an important utilitarian goal. That is one of the beauties of so much art. I don't subscribe to the notion put forth by Spencer that art is about aesthetics and not function (even with the qualification he gave). In short, I think it's important, especially with art, not to draw clear lines of distinction and not to try to define within strict limits what either art or the artist is or does.<br>

<br>

Adams shooting for a certain amount of celebrity makes sense if his goal was to infuse society with a sense of the importance of the preservation of the environment. He recognized and immersed himself in the aesthetic wonder of that environment while also facing it functionally in order to have an affect in and on the world. Becoming well known helped his overall mission and likely informed how he photographed and presented that world. His was, in part, an endeavor of idealizing the environment at a time when that made a lot of sense given who he was and what he wanted for that same environment. Another photographer might have chosen to show all the garbage at the foot of Half Dome (though there was probably much less of it at the time). But that vision would not be in keeping with a desire for the type of celebrity Adams wanted for the type of mission he was on artistically and environmentally. I don't want to separate who he was and how he saw himself from what he produced.<br>

<br>

Art, IMO, always has a function. Spencer is right, IMO, to the extent that it's not like a vacuum cleaner which will get rid of the dust in your house. But so much art is not meant just to be looked at. It is meant to inspire, to move, often to move to action or to change people's lives, to purge, to act as a catharsis, to bring together, to voice conflicts, to provoke, to effect political change . . .</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I think art [as by what is usually define it as], is aesthetic over function.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Unfortunately, this also applies to wallpaper and household knick-knacks, so I think there is something more to art than this.</p>

[mhahn]

<p>As a friend of mine once said about Ansel Adams, "What's not to love"? But it's true that there are plenty of other great photographers. A few days ago I was thumbing through a coffee table book of photographs by Cecil Beaton, who I was only vaguely aware of. Beautiful photographs. Showed such a command of what he was doing. </p>

[Julie H]

<p>I'm going to give a long quote, below, by Kirk Varnedoe, writing about Picasso. I hope its parallels to the discussion of Ansel Adams in this thread will be obvious enough to need no explanation. (I have added paragraph breaks to make this easier to read online):<br>

.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>... it was not the fans and promoters [of Picasso and his art] (who argued for connections to Plato and <em>n</em>-dimensional physics) but the unconvinced mockers and nay-sayers (who thought they saw connections to cheap cabaret humor) who ultimately had a more telling, insightful grasp on the principles of the art at hand. In this case, as in others, if we ignore those aspects of Picasso on which the doubters harp, we surely truncate the subject.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] Not just in some simplistic equation of personality and painting, but closer to the center of the artistic achievement itself, Picasso's formidable capacity for revelation and his facile showmanship closely cohabited, just as his fearless, instinctual self-reliance has as its flip side a frequently uncritical self-indulgence, his force of passion twinned with his weakness for sentiment and his profound seriousness as an artist was often inseparable from his raunchy schoolboy humor.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] Fascination with difficult magic and doubts about easy play will never be — and never should be — extricated one from the other in our attempts to come to terms with the man and his legacy. It is worth considering, though, that the frequency of friend-turned-enemy among Picasso's critics suggests that he himself may have made the rules, or raised the level of expectations, by which he has sometimes been deemed to fail.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] Moreover, in the course of modern art, one of Picasso's most important roles may have been a negatively charged one, of provoking contestation or opposition: some very potent sparks of both modern creativity and modern criticism have, for a long time now, been caused by striking against the flint of the models of art and artmaking that Picasso provided.</p>

</blockquote>

<p> </p>

[donald_miller5]

<p>I love it when this sort of thread gets going. We really need to come up with a clear narrow "technical" definition so we know it when we see it (lol). Actually whether we like it or not IMHO we may have to accept wallpaper as art as distasteful as it is and insulting to our intelligence. I said this before but will relate it again for what it is worth. I asked an ex family who made his living as a sculpture and exquisitely celebral what is art? his very simple answer is it is something created by an artist. I guess if I asked what is an artist he would have answered the obverse. Simply these words speak to the intangible definition of art. </p>

[James G. Dainis]

In response to Mr. Varnedoe,

 

I'm troubled by how the disjunctive perturbation of the relationships contextualize the inherent overspecificity. It should be added that the suggestions within the realm of discourse conceptually activate the exploration of profuse concepts.

 

I can use artspeak also.

[Julie H]

<p>It's not Varnedoe's fault; he was writing for a Picasso audience, not a photo.net audience.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>we may have to accept wallpaper as art</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Donald, I hope you won't mind if I turn this on its head. If there's anything art is, it's not having to accept anything. The draw (and challenge) of so much art is how good it is at rejecting so-called givens. I am happy to commit to wallpaper not being art. Heck, it doesn't even fit into your friend's definition since I doubt the company producing the wallpaper considered itself an artist (and even the designer probably did not). <br>

<br>

Now, the thing is, I know that as soon as I declare that wallpaper is not art, Marcel Duchamp may come along and paper a gallery wall with the most typical wallpaper in order to prove me wrong. And that's good. Art may be living with just that contradiction. <br>

<br>

Acceptance - Rejection - Acceptance - Rejection - Neo-Acceptance - Neo Rejection - Something else - . . . <br>

<br>

This is a simplistic outline of <em>how art works</em>, which I usually find a more productive discussion than <em>what art is</em>.</p>

[donald_miller5]

Point taken. I throw these things in sometimes since questions like this to me have no boundaries when you get down

down to the exceptions to the rule. But you did lead me to another thought. What about reproductions? We have massed

produced ones (ala Sears Roebuck paintings for the new apartment), to serial numbered lithographs, injection molded

statues etc etc. when we digitalize a photo and resize it for PN what do we call it? Of course you may ask why bring up

these extremes? For me we cross a threshold somewhere and by citing the extreme we work backwards to determine

where the threshold is.

[Supriyo]

I think, I will distinguish here between art and the means of disseminating it. The original statue was the product of an

artist. The replicas are the means of disseminating it. Looking at the replica, I can extrapolate back to the original art.

Same with the copies of paintings. I don't consider my music system as art, but the music coming out of it is. It is the

artist's expression that is being communicated through all the replicas, or digital prints. This is what is common among all

of them, which constitutes the art IMO.

[Supriyo]

Instead of ascribing whole discrete objects to art, perhaps we can talk in terms of aspects. A replica can reproduce all or some

aspects of the original work that constitute artistic expression. In a painting, the image, the individual brush strokes, the texture of the surface all can be

parts of the artistic expression. In a picture of that painting (reproduced in a magazine), I will have to focus on the image

aspect of the art, while missing on the other aspects.

 

I think, when we describe an object as art, it is the abbreviation of the phrase "work of art". The object is the product of an

artistic pursuit, not the whole art itself.

[johne37179]

<p>I have been enjoying this photography/art discussion for about 70 years now.</p>

[eric_m4]

<p>I haven't read all the previous post so maybe this has already been mentioned. Ansel Adams, Weston and many others were greats but Ansel is often credited with developing printing/darkroom techniques which obviously appeals to photographers. He also appealed to the whole environmentalist movement, and he's subject matter had mass appeal with the general public who enjoy topics of Americana. He has much more mass appeal than others from his era. Weston and others don't get as much attention for all those qualities.</p>

[johne37179]

<p>Something many don't know is that Ansel was on the original board of the Sierra Club, but resigned in a dispute over the actions of David Brower.</p>

[Uhooru]

<p>The reason that Adams could get a page as compared to a half-of page for Weston is because of his writings of three of the more important text books in wet darkroom photography. A lot of times that will get discussed. But to tell you the truth, in terms of talking about photographer's work, I think Weston gets more copy than Adams. </p>

[stephen_behr]

<p>Easy.<br>

Better marketing at the time. Books, guides, tutor groups. He was amazing at marketing. He popularity came from the "do as I show you and you can make pictures like mine". We all know though, the trouble he took to produce the print he wanted.</p>