The Art of Talking Art

Sparrow said:
I’ve been collecting this sort of twaddle for years, years back one could only find it in glossy brochures from the more pretentious galleries of Mayfair here or Chelsea and Soho in NY. These days it’s getting everywhere.

Check out the work of American artist Nat Tate, if you want a really good laugh at their expense.

Having said that, some of the stuff written about Leica can be as bad, I collect that too
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Stewart - you need to get out more!...maybe take a 'mistress' 😉
Dave.
 
Turtle said:
Is this a problem? Does it matter? Does it bother you? Am I just a tired, ignorant traditionalist (I am not yet 35) who has missed the 'artistic revolution' within the photographic medium?
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No, not at all. I think that the essence of art is to be creative, to do something that hasn't been done before. Since people are always doing creative things, it's harder to be original. That's why art has a tendency to be "out there" sometimes. Artists have to try some esoteric or obtuse things to be creative.
 
there is also something to be said about venues and opportunities to "try". it needs to happen and with it comes things we might not dig on so much. however that is a fair trade of when the likes of Burtynski rises from it all (my humble opinion).
 
i would tend to think that the curators job is to "balance" what we are viewing in said venue?

i tend to agree in the sense that i care little about the "statement".
 
Sometimes I think the fundamentalist religious leaders of all stripes gather together amongst themselves on occasion and laugh their a$$e$ off at the way so many gullible people just eat up all of the balderbash, and then they proceed to fill the collection plates to overflowing, time after time, week after week after week.

"Oh Lord won't you buy me a brand new M9, my friends all shoot Nikons but a Leica's just fine..."
 
MikeL said:
I haven't had a chance to read Sokal's Beyond the Hoax, but here's a blurb from the publisher:

In 1996, NYU physicist Sokal published a paper entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in an academic journal. Shortly thereafter, and to great furor, Sokal reported that his paper was a parody of postmodernism. This collection of 10 essays, six of which have been previously published, expands upon the central ideas of that academic joke. Sokal demands a respect for evidence and attacks postmodernists, fundamentalists and the muddle-headed of all political and apolitical stripes. The opening chapter presents the original hoax paper in its entirety, with the addition of annotations describing how he came to write it and explaining all the inside jokes. In subsequent chapters, Sokal explains how postmodernists confuse truth with claims of truth, fact with assertions of fact, and knowledge with pretensions to knowledge, and demonstrates how pseudoscientists have adopted a similar perspective.
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I started reading it - but soon got p*ssed off and went back to 'Harry Potter'.
 
After dating someone who was seriously into Lacan, I've wondered if pomo itself wasn't simply an outsized inside joke. (Okay, she was infuriatingly cute...)

- Barrett
 
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Went for a coffee with an old colleague a few days ago, he quizzed me for half and hour about Foucault! Worst coffee ever!

Edit: And those Aperture photographs are ****!
 
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_mark__ said:
Went for a coffee with an old colleague a few days ago, he quizzed me for half and hour about Foucault! Worst coffee ever!

Edit: And those Aperture photographs are ****!
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this is where these threads go a little lame for me. how do we arrive at ****? shouldn't we all start adding IMHO or some other disclaimer afterwards if we aren't actually going to explain our reasoning behind ****?
 
Well, here it is the first of December, scattered clouds, the gentlest of breezes, and somewhere in the mid-eighties (F) or warmer. Time to head out, camera in hand, in search of a cup of coffee and some long haired co-eds in low cut tops and miniskirts. I think I'll take the Rolleiflex. Turns out that it's a real chick magnet!

And NO, Mikel, I hadn't seen that over sharpened over saturated photo before. The tie doesn't go with the suit and neither one does his eyes justice.
 
emraphoto said:
this is where these threads go a little lame for me. how do we arrive at ****? shouldn't we all start adding IMHO or some other disclaimer afterwards if we aren't actually going to explain our reasoning behind ****?
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Ok, not to my tastes, apologies. Though the four stars could of signified any number of things, good, poor, nice etc. You yourself filled in the gap. My four stars read "crap." Why? Because they are.
 
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all is good Mark. i mean they are not to my taste either really but it is about the process as much as the end result.
 
While I agree that there's certainly a lot of BS in the art world and a lot of crap being sold I strongly disagree that there's something wrong with, let's call it 'academic art' and art speak per se.

I'm pretty annoyed by this popular notion that art is bad because it requires a certain degree of academic knowledge. Lots of things worth appreciating require a certain degree of knowledge in a specific field. This goes for wine, whiskey, even rangefinder cameras, so why should it be any different for art? Some art is an acquired taste but that doesn't mean it's not good. Just as an example, I think Jeff Wall's work requires quite a bit of knowledge in order to be really appreciated and I think his work is excellent.
 
emraphoto said:
all is good Mark. i mean they are not to my taste either really but it is about the process as much as the end result.
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You are right, I was dismissive but it was light hearted, so I again apologise; I did not mean to trivialize the thread! I do take the philosophy and theory of photography very seriously but I also have to take it in good humour.
 
Turtle said:
This is not a thread about whether photography is art, but whether conceptual artists are invading photography.
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I think one of the reasons for this "invasion" is the abundance of iconic imagery that is produced in the commercial world nowadays. If Ansel Adams (which I'm not a big fan of) would work today he'd most likely photograph landscapes to be used for car adverts.
 
Clearly I am not somebody to speak as I never had to write a artist statement, but there do seem to be a bit of a trend in some circles towards considering the rest of us as the uninformed proletariat, proofs generally in the pudding.

.
 
bmattock said:
The problem is that 80% of the language of critique is a fraud and a humbug.
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I agree. One cannot be informed about things that are nonsensical and pseudointellectual without either propagating the same or actually contributing to it. Its a personal decision, but doing so would be a minor form of 'selling my soul' and hanging onto my soul has always served me quite well thus far.

I suppose what niggles me is that at an intellectual level the sort of art speak one frequently hears makes no sense or is as elementary a mental exercise as the average concept posed to young teenagers at school (yet is passed off as some kind of revelation) only accompanied by uninteresting photographs. If you do not buy into this self-delusion you are somehow 'not getting it'. There are lots of very, very clever people out there, but they have an uncanny tendency to make sense or at least make you quite aware that their concepts, even if beyond you, are the product of processes, ideas or sub-concepts that are more than just 'fluff'. Its about things being real no matter how tangential, surprising, or revolutionary. Whats the point in an intellectual/creative/artistic statement, idea or concept if it falls apart in the first sentence of nonsense? How can it be art or anything to which we attribute words with commonly accepted meaning, if their foundations do not allow for directed thought and understanding?
 
I devote a bit of time and mental energy to understand artists' statements and the like. If it's goobledygook or trite, I ignore it and move on. I fail to see any point in fussing about it, but then I'm not trying to make it in the contemporary photography game.
 
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