Arbus Retrospective Draws Criticism

[nikos79]

There is no art without the viewer. If the art doesn't change the viewer, then it isn't art.

A true artist would still do art without the need of an audience

 

[Don_ih]

Here are some fun facts:

Contemporary whining and the reducing of truth to subjective opinion is not the result of postmodernism. It's just what happens when Cartesian epistemology loses its God.

Art is a product of a certain kind of human activity - doesn't rely on an audience understanding it as art. But there are plenty of things in existence that are not the product of human activity that humans appreciate in the same way they appreciate art.

The same inane logic behind saying a tree falling in the forest makes no sound can be applied to the tree itself - i.e., there is no tree.

If you don't know what ideal realism is, you don't know what postmodernism is. Postmodernism is not simply a reaction to late 19th century metaphysics, though. It's very much embedded in early 20th century European history - and all the beautiful events and examples of how swell people can be when they get in power. There's a genuine good reason to force people to question what they normally accept on authority, when the authority is a despot or a maniacal imbecile.

Sartre wasn't an existentialist. He was a satirist.

 

[Pieter12]

No, a sound has to be heard. Otherwise, it's just vibrations in the air.

Isn't that the definition of sound? There are sounds that cannot be heard.

 

[Vaughn]

That's a very artistic picture, Vaughn. You are an artist.

Wish I felt the same -- even viewed at its actual size (5x7) it just does not work the way I'd like it to. Every leaf is reflecting light, the fog is going through the top of the trees, I've got the reflection, there's the interesting feature in the center, but to reference another thread, there is little visual order brought out of the chaos. The scene remains dimensionally flat. So it goes. Too bad high water a couple years ago sent that log down stream again. Still a nice pool. to swim in.

This is a quick image of one of my boys (2006)...he's been living and working in Tokyo the past few years. We had just hiked down to the creek from the trailhead and about to head a couple miles up creek. Most of it is like this, with a few narrow sections. So when I mentioned a redwood falling across the creek and damming it up, it was in a place like this.

 

[chuckroast]

Here are some fun facts:

Contemporary whining and the reducing of truth to subjective opinion is not the result of postmodernism. It's just what happens when Cartesian epistemology loses its God.

Maybe eventually, but long after Descartes waned and we get to Locke and Leibniz the pursuit of truth pretty much assumed it was objectively so. The Enlightenment could otherwise not have happened.

This may be a matter of terminology. "Objective" doesn't mean "Absolute". There is some distance between the theist's view that truth is absolute and the more broad idea the truth is "objective" - that something which is true doesn't depend on how I feel about it. This is the fallacy of "personal truth". For example, you don't have to be a devout theist to maintain that - whatever the universe is - it is, independent of my opinions or feelings.

The relativization of truth to experience started with a variety of existentialists, but it takes a clear turn off the skids with the appearance of Derridas deconstructionism (which I still think was the biggest intellectual scam of the era) and then applied by the postmoderns.

This appears widely in the culture these days, but nowhere more loudly than in the arts. As we've been discussing here, photography (but also literature, music and so) is wrung through these malignant notions that we get to impose our ideas of the past on the work to the point that the author's likely intention or context is lost entirely.

I have never seen a single example of this stuff that does not involve the speaker trying to inflict their own politics, their own social values, their own pretensions, and the like upon the work of artists long before them.
I've mentioned Kimball's "The Rape Of The Master" here before. He documents - in painful detail - some of the horrific violations of art this kind of thinking leads to.

As a personal example, I greatly admire Salgado's photographs. He was clearly motivated by his socio-political views - to the point that it almost feels like propaganda to me. But that doesn't give me permission to dismiss the work as not being good art or that I need to desconstruct him and filter the output through my personal views. The only thing I can legitimately do is see the work as he presented it. Yes, I need to have a sense of his worldview to inform my understanding of his work, but I am not magically entitled to dimiss his art as terrible because I don't may not like his worldview. The art is sufficient in its own right, it does not need, nor benefit from me shoving myself into it.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

A true artist would still do art without the need of an audience

Isn't it a little presumptuous for a photographer to call his photos art if no one has seen them? "I'm not just a photographer but an artist."

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Isn't that the definition of sound? There are sounds that cannot be heard.

Sound has to be heard to be sound.

a
: a particular auditory impression : tone

b
: the sensation perceived by the sense of hearing
c
: mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (such as air) and is the objective cause of hearing

Here's a definition for art. If no one has seen it, how can one know of its beauty or emotional power?
the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power

 

[GregY]

Sound has to be heard to be sound.

a
: a particular auditory impression : tone

b
: the sensation perceived by the sense of hearing
c
: mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (such as air) and is the objective cause of hearing

Here's a definition for art. If no one has seen it, how can one know of its beauty or emotional power?
the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power

noun

1 - vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person's or animal's ear.
"light travels faster than sound"

2 - sound produced by continuous and regular vibrations, as opposed to noise.

 

[GregY]

Isn't it a little presumptuous for a photographer to call his photos art if no one has seen them? "I'm not just a photographer but an artist."

Alan, if there is no audience, the photographer doesn't need to "call his photos" anything at all

 

[Chuck1]

When the tree hits the ground
The worms will know something happened

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Alan, if there is no audience, the photographer doesn't need to "call his photos" anything at all

My wife and I went to Paris and London two years ago. I put together a ten-minute slide show that she hasn't seen yet, nor has anyone else but me. I keep trying to convince her to take the time to watch telling her it's very artistic. So she says to me, "How do you know they're artistic if no one's seen them yet?"

 

[GregY]

Alan, I think philosophically there is a difference between a photographer taking photographs, and a man trying to convince his wife that his photos are artistic.

 

[Mike Lopez]

Alan, I think philosophically there is a difference between a photographer taking photographs, and a man trying to convince his wife that his photos are artistic.

If you took away boomers’ affinities for complaining about their wives, there’d literally be nothing to talk about.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Alan, I think philosophically there is a difference between a photographer taking photographs, and a man trying to convince his wife that his photos are artistic.

Is there?

 

[Mike Lopez]

That's a very artistic picture, Vaughn. You are an artist.

It appears that @Vaughn isn’t moved by the picture. It must not be art.

 

[GregY]

Is there?

Yes....there is no discussion, no 2nd person...no one to convince......
just the creative act .......

 

[MartinCrabtree]

Fortunately it seems many artists still make art regardless of whether it fits a definition of art...or not

 

[GregY]

Fortunately it seems many artists still make art regardless of whether it fits a definition of art...or not

 

[retina_restoration]

Fortunately it seems many artists still make art regardless of whether it fits a definition of art...or not

Exactly.

It's absurd to suggest that no art has been made if there are no viewers to see it. There is always one viewer: the one who made it. "Art" does not require anyone else's participation.

 

[Pieter12]

Sound has to be heard to be sound.

a
: a particular auditory impression : tone

b
: the sensation perceived by the sense of hearing
c
: mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (such as air) and is the objective cause of hearing

Here's a definition for art. If no one has seen it, how can one know of its beauty or emotional power?
the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power

There are sounds you can't hear, but other creatures can. Some people are partially deaf, do only the sounds they hear exist? Low frequency sounds can be felt but not heard. If the creator/artist is the only one to see his or her creation, they can still appreciate it for its beauty or emotional power. No one else need see it. Beethoven was deaf when he wrote his 9th symphony, he heard it in his head. That was enough.

 

[Pieter12]

Isn't it a little presumptuous for a photographer to call his photos art if no one has seen them? "I'm not just a photographer but an artist."

No one specified good art.

 

[chuckroast]

Sound has to be heard to be sound.

a
: a particular auditory impression : tone

b
: the sensation perceived by the sense of hearing
c
: mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (such as air) and is the objective cause of hearing

Here's a definition for art. If no one has seen it, how can one know of its beauty or emotional power?
the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power

Let's do this as a proof by contradiction.

Here is an example of a sound that no person hears. A natural occurring sound - say a thunderclap - when no human is present, can trigger an avalanche on a snow covered mountain. The snow responds to the very real presence of the sound.

Here's another. The natural sound of the wind can cause a resonance with causes a manmade structure to collapse, like the Tacoma Narrows bridge. In that case, humans were present to record the event, but it wasn't the humans hearing it that was the relevant issue. Had they not been there, the bridge would still have shaken itself to destruction.

Entire branches of structural engineering are dedicated to making sure such natural sounds do not destroy what we build, whether someone is there or no to witness it.

As you are defining it, sound is really the response to the human ear of a wave traveling through the air. But if a human were not present, that wave would still exist, assuming it was not of human origin in the first place.

To the point of this discussion: An artist is always a witness to their own art. No other person may see/hear/touch the art, but the artist themselves can. Art is never created without the witness of the artist. There is no "tree falling" analogy that applies here.

 

[Chuck1]

How about one hand clapping

 

[Vaughn]

How about one hand clapping

You mean as in across a cheek?

Isn't it a little presumptuous for a photographer to call his photos art if no one has seen them? "I'm not just a photographer but an artist."

"Just" a photographer? I believe that EW's wish to be called a photographer rather than an artist was driven by a view that people were trying to label him as an artist instead as a photographer as way of explaining why his photographs (not normally considered an art form by many at the time) were so good (were art).

What I got from his writings was that the title photographer should be as synonymous with artist as is painter, sculptor, and so forth. My take on it, YMMD.

 

[nikos79]

Isn't it a little presumptuous for a photographer to call his photos art if no one has seen them? "I'm not just a photographer but an artist."

I am trying to think but I cannot recall many photographers that really considered themselves as artists.
Eugene Atget definitely not, neither HCB, neither Andre Kertesz, neither Gary Winogrand.
They called themselves primarily a photographer. In that sense I agree with you that we came to appreciate them through the eyes of the (sensitive and trained) viewer. It would be very sad to create photographs simply for your own sake.

The problem in my opinion is that photography is so simple that people forget how difficult it really is to create an interesting photograph. I am going to elaborate even further:
I don't believe that there exists not even a single photograph in the history of the medium that can be called a "masterpiece". Photography is not painting to call for Mona Lisa, it is created in 1/60th of a second (and 60 years of experience as HCB once quoted). Photography is a poor damn thing. Imho the only "masterpiece" is the artist, when we see his whole work and discover another world, his own poetic language.