If you bake a cake the most wonderful cake, is it truly wonderful if no one eats it. How would they know?
Sure I understand the "shoot for yourself" thing, but again this is a process for achieving something, not an answer for whether the achieving of it is worth persueing in the first place or even if it is achiveable at all.
Eventually you have to define "art" if you want to go any further...
I am generalising, but much of art today is an art of ideas rather than anything else...whoever comes up with the cleverest idea wins the prize. Plus a large dash of having any hint of the past in your picture is derivitive and commits the ultimate sin of modern art - unoriginality.
Art, I have observed in my wisdom, is a matter fashion, just like womens hemlines and the sneaker. The fashion today and in other things in society - is the preciousness and the right of the indivual to be an individual. This brings up the position where art is what the artisist says it is, and it doesnt matterif the viewer doesnt understand completely what the artist intended, it is enough that the artist know himself, the ultimate in self expression you see. This is why "anything" can be art.
I see I havnt yet defined anything...okay for me art is about communication - there are somethings that cannot be communicated to another person except through art, whether it be music or pictures, or the feelings that may be evoked at the end of a story.
Which brings me to my point - ramble about modern art and all - is that if you have a situation where you shoot only for yourself and have no concept even however vague that your pictures should or may be seen, then this an equivilent position to creating "art" only for yourself - as long as you know it then that is enough. But without communication of whatever intent to a viewer, listener, an audience, then it ceases to have any meaning whatsoever, it's "art", and message is simply latent.
If no ones ever sees a photograph then can you even define it as a photograph anymore, since any definition of a photograph must includes a viewer.
Sure you can shoot for yourself, and follow what pleases you, and enjoy the finding and the making of pictures, but without a viewer (God grant us a sympathetic viewer) as far as photography goes, you could argue that you didnt actually make anything at all.
So you have to have art that works, and you have have to viewers, you have to have communication. So without either one you have nothing.
Even Van Gogh, who I think is the one who created the cultural figure of the poor starving artist who painted only for himself (or this concept arose from the historical figure of Van Gogh) desperately wanted an audience. I argue that without one his paintings were not relevant, he himself was not relevant and he went off and shot himself, making himself actually irrelevant.
Someone mentioned Da Vinci - Da Vinci never painted a thing in his life he didnt have commssion for. I suspect the idea of "painting for yourself" would have left most Rennaissance artists looking at you blankly. But then the definition of art has changed since then I think.
The idea of creating art only for yourself, shooting for yourself is a modern concept, the denial of the vewier, the audience, the public as a participant in the art. To take it to the length of cariacature, it becomes simple snobbery, where the normal people at my work I mentioned are not cultured enough to understand it, are not relevant to the artist (!) and there for they simply dont bother with art with a capital A anyomore. They are not invited to that party. It becomes a social phenomonon, where only people of a certain social group are permitted to understand Art and the rest are just the extras in the backgorund of a Van Goh painting forking hay. A form of art fascism.
So maybe its not that photographic art is not relevant ( Rueban I use the word in the sense of "having meaning") perhaps its more that (modern) artists have made the veiwer irrelevant.
