Art Appreciation

[KevinR]

I am glad that I lived long enough to see a time that every man with a 2000 bucks to spend on a camera can be an artist. It is nice to know that with your nikon they pack the soul of an artist... just add water...

I am not sure if this is tongue in cheek or not.

I think alot of people have the soul of an artist, they just have not found a way to express that soul.

I wonder if it is the context that we find that type of shot that is "kitsch". If this where a series of shots in National Geographic, would we feel a little differently?

 

[LaFoto]

I tend to doubt a photo of this kind would appear in National Geographic...

 

[Rob]

I am glad that I lived long enough to see a time that every man with a 2000 bucks to spend on a camera can be an artist. It is nice to know that with your nikon they pack the soul of an artist... just add water...

I'm not listening to someone who doesn't have a "pro" badge. :lmao:

Rob

 

[Rob]

I am not sure if this is tongue in cheek or not.

I think alot of people have the soul of an artist, they just have not found a way to express that soul.

I wonder if it is the context that we find that type of shot that is "kitsch". If this where a series of shots in National Geographic, would we feel a little differently?

Paragraph #1 If I know Charlie.... it's tongue in cheek

#2 Absolutely

#3 I rather think not. And I suspect that you're not likely to see something like that any time soon.

Rob

 

[mysteryscribe]

Oh you mean that I didn't waste those thirty years in trying to figure it all out. I thought from a comment on this thread earlier that it was the time of man, when anyone who bought a fancy DSLR was automatically an artist. I joined the discussion rather late...Sorry for the confusion...

 

[Rob]

Oh you mean that I didn't waste those thirty years in trying to figure it all out. I thought from a comment on this thread earlier that it was the time of man, when anyone who bought a fancy DSLR was automatically an artist. I joined the discussion rather late...Sorry for the confusion...

It rather depends if you think like Marcel and aren't allowed to **** in it.

 

[mysteryscribe]

I have never been charged with thinking like anyone else lol.....Most of the time I don't think at all....

But I do think that selling a person a DSLR without a warning tag is right up there with selling cigarettes to kids without warning labels

Warning: owning this Nikon camera does not make you a expert photographer let alone an artist, and may be hazardous to your health: if you say look at my big camera .... oh I have no idea what an fstop is.... I don't need to know I have a F***** Nikon...You may get your donkey kicked

 

[Torus34]

Hey, guys and gals! Mystery Scribe is making a point here. Attention must be paid. There is a tendency for tyros to feel that a better camera will result in better prints. That's brought to heel by noting that if only van Gogh could have afforded better brushes and pigments . . .

[Side comment to Mystery Scribe: I know that you don't need an apologist, but this just cried out for clarification.]

 

[mysteryscribe]

Hell terri has to usually run interference for me.... thanks for the help....

Well van gogh could have used a better shrink his brother must have really sucked

 

[terri]

Hell terri has to usually run interference for me.... thanks for the help....

Well van gogh could have used a better shrink his brother must have really sucked

You're just trying to see if I'm lurking here by forcing a comment! Well, it won't work.






....dammit! :x

 

[mysteryscribe]

no no this is what i say when i want you to comment... my god you are cute....

 

[JohnMF]

Maybe fashion has something to do with it? Photos of dolpins, red ferraris, and bare chested men holding a baby in B&W all remind me of the eighties, and the eighties was a pretty ugly decade. Maybe that's why you can respond bad to a certain type/piece of art? Letting it influence your judgement

 

[mysteryscribe]

I look back over the years at my neg file and am amazed at all the shots and the statistical relationship between real art and crap...

 

[Luke]

Let me clarify..... what i mean by minimal training, is not a quick rundown of a cameras functions..... i meant like a 2 year foundation collage course.... in a photographers career this would still be considered minimal training, and yes some of these people do leave college without going on to higher courses and decide to hold public exhibitions as 'artists'.

Also i would say you can make a bad shot good in ps?

hehe, some photographers are self taught, some good ones, very talented, anyway, bottom line is, if a crap photographer can be good cos of digital, imagine how good a talented photographer will be, i don't think this will brng any sort of revolution.

(i can't believe im defending digital, this from the guy who's idea of fun is breaking out the delta 400 and going to the CBD, or going to the darkroom at lunch)

 

[mysteryscribe]

1860 comment by watercolorist... the Fkn camera thingie is a flash in the pan....

1910... comment by portrait painter... woe is me that Eastman thing is going to fix it so we never sell another painting. It is just matter of time...

1940... Comment by 4x5 graflex photographer... mark my words the 120 camera will put an end to photography as a business, anyone will be able to have one. If any idiot can shoot ten shots he will get one good one. It is the end of serious photography.

1960... comment by 120 photographer... Damn 35mm will kill us all. If they ever get the film right it will mean any idiot can go out and shoot 200 shots of his friend's wedding and we will be out of business, mark my words. That's not to mention the idot Land's toy camera putting all the labs out of business.

1999... Comment by the ghost of them all in a huddle.... Okay we were wrong before but by god digital cameras will mark the end of all other forms of art. We just don't need anything else. Any piece of crap anyone shoots can be fixed in the software.
**************
The only problem is art and artistry has always been about what you shoot, or what you paint, more than what kind of brush or camera you did it with. You can't sell that as a camera accessory and sometimes you can't even teach it. I would made a pretty good guess that the number of successful "art" photographers is much less then the number of people who graduate from the Schools teaching you how to be an artist.

And art school drop outs arent the only ones pretending to be artists. In the end "THE WORK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF". When the piece hits it's home, on someone's wall or in a museum even, I have never seen a label that tells what camera, what fstop, what brush, what paper, or how the artist held his brush...

listen up I'll say it again.... THE WORK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF.....

Sometimes it is more about marketing than the work and that is sad. A painter in this area comes to mind. They say he is a great draftsman, but not a real artist. I tend to agree because I to would like to make the money he makes and therefore I too am envious. It might not be art but it hangs in might fancy places, and he might wrongly consider himself an artist, but he doesn't worry about paying his car payment next month.

One last thing on a personal note.... If Art were about perfection, there would be about zero pieces made previous to today. I see an awful lot of digital photography these days and you know what. I can usually tell that it is because there is so much perfection. Don't cha think that this kind of cookie cutter perfection will tend to get boring after a while. There are about a thousand ways to process an image that is well composed and well executed even with digital. The old house on the beach that we all played with comes to mind. But a piece of crap no matter how you wrap it still smells after a while. To a real artist the media never made a heck of a lot of difference and to us hacks it didn't either. So digital in the end isn't going to change a thing but the way people do what they always did.

You see it, you shoot (compose) it, you process it, and then it is an orphan and has to stand on it's own.