I Am Not An Artist Redux

I Am Not An Artist.

That’s a statement I’ve made many times before, so often in fact that it now gets all capital letters and has become somewhat of a mantra of mine.

The main reason I hold this view is because of how I define art. Art, to me, is goal directed. It’s conceived of and intended as a medium for a message. It’s meant to communicate something to the viewer – an emotion, a story, an idea. Often, it’s layered and subject to interpretation – but the point of it is still whatever message it’s conveying. I don’t do that – I just shoot things that I think are pretty or interesting, with no deeper meaning than that.

But another issue that I’ve often had with “art” are the attitudes so often expressed by the art community itself. “Real artists” take it way, way too seriously. They’re control freaks – obsessing about what the viewer can see and how they can see it. And that bugs me to the point that I simply want no part of that community.

(Caution: some not safe for work content in the next two links. I warn you just in case you’re actually at work. If you’re honestly bothered by nudity… you annoy me worst of all.)

One of the things the NYT article I posted about a minute ago enlightened me to was this fantastic treatise by Flickr photographer Merkley, I’m Not A Photographer, which says just about the same thing I’ve tried to say (substituting “Photographer” for “Artist”), only a whole lot better. It’s worth a read, and I thought worthy of its own post.

I take photographs and share images I like. Whether it’s any good or not is up to others to decide, though in all honesty I’d probably evaluate 75% of my own work as “or not”. But in either case, good or not, I’m not making art.

Fine art photography is dead. Long live fine art photography!

An article in the New York Times today takes a look at how Flickr is changing fine art photography:

Consider photography. As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph.

The article describes how (often extensive) post-processing has become a necessary ingredient to Flickr popularity by profiling some of the top Flickr photographers, and how this differs from traditional fine art photography. A quick perusal of Flickr’s Explore validates this – as I write this, this photo by *lemonade* happens to occupy the number one spot. I happen to think it’s brilliant, but it’s demonstrative of the kind of heavy post processing typical of successful Flickr photos – an anathema to many in the art world.

I’ve sometimes been critical of Explore; it tends to favor photos of cliché subjects photos of flowers, sunsets, and cats (case in point, my most recent photo to hit explore was this one of tulips which I posted yesterday). Though the criticism that I try to express isn’t so much that I find something wrong with that, but that it tends to overlook some of the more original and creative stuff on Flickr, at leat in my humble opinion.

Despite this bias (or perhaps, because of it), it does demonstrate just how much of a schism there is between art photography and photography enthusiasts. People respond most enthusiastically to color, to surrealism, to things that are cute and pretty – stuff that the art world mostly shuns. Thomas Hawk, mentioned in the NYT article, puts it more bluntly in his blog than I dare to:

One of the stories that I conveyed to Virginia Heffernan, the reporter at the Times who wrote this article, was a story of a Cartier-Bresson photograph which a critique group of Flickr shouted down as inferior photography without knowing it was an actual Cartier-Bresson. While one take away from that story might be that the general Flickr community simply has poor taste in art, another take away might be to question the previously unquestionable. Was Cartier-Bresson actually that good? And would his work stand up today as it has in the past?

(The incident in question can still be found here. The comment thread is enlightening; draw what conclusions you will.)

For the record, I think Cartier-Bresson is damn good. But he’s not my favorite.

As Thomas Hawk also notes, irrespective of how good famous fine art photographers were, they were selected by a tiny, isolated, out of touch and incestuous group of gatekeepers – who basically dictated what was good and what had value. What we’re seeing now is the democratization of art, at least in the realm of photography.

That much I certainly agree with, and I can’t see it as anything other than a good thing.