…lend your ears to music, open your eyes to paining, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to "walk about" into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?
— Wassily Kandinsky, in On the Spiritual in Art, 1910
Gallery owner Edward Winkleman has an interesting discussion going on at his blog about whether being too well-informed interferes with appreciating/enjoying art.
I’m with Winkleman: I say no. I have no problem blanking my mind and going for the ride. It’s only once the experience has run its course that I may try to figure out why it was the way it was, and it’s just as likely to be influenced by my state at the time as by composition or density range.
Food, on the other hand, is another matter for me. It may be because I’m probably a better pastry chef than I am a photographer, and having spent a large part of my youth in a commercial restaurant kitchen, have spent a lot more time paying attention to the experience of eating than I have to the experience of viewing art, but it’s difficult to go out and enjoy a meal. Dessert? Forget it. 9 times out of 10, I’m not even going to bother. It’s not that I go looking for food to be unenjoyable to boost my ego or anything, I simply can’t help but notice it. It’s like trying to watch a movie in which you can see the crew walking around in the background and the boom mic bobbing up and down at the top of the screen. (Oddly, this happens far less with home-cooked meals than it does at restaurants. Maybe there is something to that whole context thing…)
Who knows, maybe I’ll feel differently when I know more and have more experience looking at art. But for now, it’s not a problem.
Gallery owner Edward Winkleman has a characteristically thoughtful and thought-provoking post on his blog about artists disowning early "non-representative" works and the implied social contract of selling art:
What’s emerged in conversations lately (due mostly to Richard Prince’s refusal to permit reproduction of his much earlier work for a catalog accompanying an exhibition of it) is a question about authorship, specifically whether an artist can essentially rescind authorship because the earlier work no longer represents their current vision. Can Richard Prince declare that for all intents and purposes an earlier work he created is not "a Richard Prince"?
Continue reading, don’t skip the comments!
I really recommend Winkleman’s blog as a whole: his writing explores interesting territories within art and art business while provoking intelligent discussion in the comments. A+ all the way.
There’s some interesting discussion in the comments on this post, Since when is bigger better? about ever-increasing print size and cost on Conscientious.
My reply to the question is this:
Since when is bigger automatically more expensive/valuable?
Different images work better in different sizes. Yes, there is a difference in material cost, but with archival inkjet printing, it’s not that much. Why charge someone more for a huge print of an image that works better at 7×7? That’s a bit of a rip-off, no? Why charge less because a particular photo happens to work best at a smaller size? I have images that are best at wallet size, but I’m not going to sell them for $5 just because they’re small.
I think we collectively need to be careful about confusing cost and value.
Concept T-Shirts’ Art Bollocks Generator spews wonderfully incoherent art bullshit. For instance:
An exploration to morph a counter-intuitive post-modernism whilst not releasing calculations seen only as sound granules of the vortex.
You get a new one every time you reload the page. "Use your art bollocks to amaze people with the complex thoughts embodied in your art…" Endless fun!
See also: Joel Swanson’s Art Crit Bingo
This is The Subconscious Art Of Graffiti Removal - III by Ektopia, and is part of his beautiful The Subconscious Art Of Graffiti Removal project. When I first saw it on Flickr, I wrote:
This is one of those great opportunities to see through someone else’s eyes. I never would have shot this this way because I probably wouldn’t have seen the scene as you did. I’d probably have been inclined to go tighter and would have missed out on this. I’m glad you shot it and not me.
In the seven months since, this photo hasn’t been far from my mind when shooting. It’s become one of those things to check in with, popping up along with many of the other basics. (Film loaded? Lens cap off? Exposure set? Focus?) It reminds me to look harder for the sweet spot of balance of subject and context, and that if all goes really well, it’s possible to make the context part of the subject itself, as he’s done here.
Thanks for the lesson!
Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven’t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography—not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself—with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear.
…
It is precisely because photos are so confusing—such utter failures at providing answers—that they are so valuable: by refusing to tell us what to feel, and allowing us to feel things we don’t quite understand, they make us dig, and even think, a little deeper.
Read article at Boston Review
Via éclectique
See what happens when Karl Zipser tackles the age-old question of what art is:
In our time, the answer to this question is under the control of the art elite. The answer to the question is simple:
"Art" is x,
where x is a variable. The value of x is approximately "something that an ordinary person could never understand."
Thought for the weekend:
To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody’s pictures suck, that’s how. I’ve seen Cartier-Bresson’s contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand’s exposures sucked. It’s the way it is.
— Mike Johnston, of 37th Frame, The Online Photographer, etc. fame, in his essay,The Magic Bullet
So how do you deal with most of your art sucking? The insanely excellent book, Art & Fear: Observations on the Peril (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orland, has some outstanding thoughts on the subject. If you like that one, chase it with Orland’s follow-up, The View From The Studio Door: How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World. I keep meaning to write reviews of both of them but never seem to find the time to do it properly. For now I’ll just say that they’re the best investments in artmaking I’ve ever made.
Paul Butzi writes at The Online Photographer:
I’m a big fan of Ted Orland’s books (especially Art and Fear [with David Bayles] and The View from the Studio Door), so I’m delighted to be able to point readers to an in-process online interview of Orland.
The interview started this past Sunday, it’s still going on, and it looks like it’s going to be well worth following.
What he said! I recommend the hell out of both books to anyone who makes art of any kind: photographers, writers, painters, dancers, musicians, sculptors… you, me, them… everybody, everybody! If I grabbed you by the throat, threw you up against a wall, and pushed the books in your face while screaming, "YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST! FUCKING! READ THIS!!!", with the force of a thousand suns, it would still fall short of conveying how strongly I feel about them.
In addition to being a great author, Orland is an accomplished photographer who now mainly shoots with a Holga.
Read the interview at The Well
