chris000
Landscaper
Everything may have been done before ..... but not necessarily by me.
lukitas
second hand noob
What a flood!
Interesting and thought-provoking.
One thing struck me : one can always find an opposite for any nugget of 'wisdom'.
'Nothing new under the sun', yes, but 'you cannot dip your toe twice in the same river'.
If both statements are 'wise', wisdom contradicts itself. Or you could accept that both statements are true, just disregard the paradox. Or find enlightenment in the gap.
Again, the daily raking of the pebbles seems to embody both 'truths' at once. Everyday, the same person rakes the same pebbles around the same rocks with the same rake, but every raking is an entirely new raking.
I think that was the point I was trying to make. It is pointless - I think - to aim for originality. Originality is after all just happenstance. You happen to grow up in a time an place and culture that bring you to perform the act of taking a photograph, you happen to have your eyes, your surroundings, your manner of choosing a frame, and all these things happen to condense into a body of work, which then is described as original (or not).
The thing to aim at is to make a photograph, a portrait, a landscape, a street scene, whatever. It is not try to make an original photograph, this is even sillier than trying to copy somebody else's work - at least you learn from copying.
The arts have been going through a lot of innovation in the past few hundred years, and art history has a tendency of framing this as a progression, an evolution towards 'something better', from primitive to civilized, from simple to complex. And the motor of that 'progression' is a given : innovation, creativity, breaking the boundaries, originality.
I think this view is wrong on many levels : for one, once a boundary has been broken, it opens new terrain, but it is ridiculous to break that boundary again, kicking in open doors. Marcel Duchamp's urinoir 'fountain' was a revelation, whereas the faeces-producing machine is just a boring repeat of the old joke. 'S**t in a museum, pffrt'. Been there, done that. For another, it is silly to see art as something that can be described with a graph. (A very bad art historian, Fenollosa, did the exercise : he made graphs of the 'quality' of Chinese and Japanese art through time, as if it were yearly earnings, or mortality and birth rates...)
Art must be about something else than innovation. Who knows what the paintings of Lascaux are about (animals of course, but what about them?) In medieval europe, it was about devotion, and then it was about showing off your fortune, and then it was about expressing emotion, bringing forth the tortured soul of the artist, and now it's about doing something nobody else has done before (I exaggerate willfully, art isn't quite dead yet, even if it smells a little funny).
I think art should be about capturing emotion, at the click of the shutter, during processing, and most of all, when the viewer is emotionally captivated.
If I try to concentrate on just taking a picture, I may sometimes make a fine capture.
Every face is a new face, but they're all the same thing : pictures of faces.
Interesting and thought-provoking.
One thing struck me : one can always find an opposite for any nugget of 'wisdom'.
'Nothing new under the sun', yes, but 'you cannot dip your toe twice in the same river'.
If both statements are 'wise', wisdom contradicts itself. Or you could accept that both statements are true, just disregard the paradox. Or find enlightenment in the gap.
Again, the daily raking of the pebbles seems to embody both 'truths' at once. Everyday, the same person rakes the same pebbles around the same rocks with the same rake, but every raking is an entirely new raking.
I think that was the point I was trying to make. It is pointless - I think - to aim for originality. Originality is after all just happenstance. You happen to grow up in a time an place and culture that bring you to perform the act of taking a photograph, you happen to have your eyes, your surroundings, your manner of choosing a frame, and all these things happen to condense into a body of work, which then is described as original (or not).
The thing to aim at is to make a photograph, a portrait, a landscape, a street scene, whatever. It is not try to make an original photograph, this is even sillier than trying to copy somebody else's work - at least you learn from copying.
The arts have been going through a lot of innovation in the past few hundred years, and art history has a tendency of framing this as a progression, an evolution towards 'something better', from primitive to civilized, from simple to complex. And the motor of that 'progression' is a given : innovation, creativity, breaking the boundaries, originality.
I think this view is wrong on many levels : for one, once a boundary has been broken, it opens new terrain, but it is ridiculous to break that boundary again, kicking in open doors. Marcel Duchamp's urinoir 'fountain' was a revelation, whereas the faeces-producing machine is just a boring repeat of the old joke. 'S**t in a museum, pffrt'. Been there, done that. For another, it is silly to see art as something that can be described with a graph. (A very bad art historian, Fenollosa, did the exercise : he made graphs of the 'quality' of Chinese and Japanese art through time, as if it were yearly earnings, or mortality and birth rates...)
Art must be about something else than innovation. Who knows what the paintings of Lascaux are about (animals of course, but what about them?) In medieval europe, it was about devotion, and then it was about showing off your fortune, and then it was about expressing emotion, bringing forth the tortured soul of the artist, and now it's about doing something nobody else has done before (I exaggerate willfully, art isn't quite dead yet, even if it smells a little funny).
I think art should be about capturing emotion, at the click of the shutter, during processing, and most of all, when the viewer is emotionally captivated.
If I try to concentrate on just taking a picture, I may sometimes make a fine capture.
Every face is a new face, but they're all the same thing : pictures of faces.
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