These quotes, as well as a few others above, reming me of the old reactions (1950s, 1960s?) to "modern" or abstract art: "hey, my five-year old could do better than that."
I should never have lead with such a provocative title, what was meant as a simple pointer to an small article on art photography i thought might be of interest to some. I didn't intend to plant a flag in the ground and invite on challengers.
If for no other reason than not wanting to be painted as a reactionary philistine, I would like to explain a little better perhaps, a few of the assumptions that have been made by others about what I meant, my fault for not explaining myself well enough to begin with.
What I meant earlier about there being an art infrastructure was a bad catchall phrase to use, but I certainly think that the art economy is much bigger than it was 20-30 years ago, art in further education is far larger than it once was, particularly in photography, with greater numbers of students going through the established courses, and more courses being added each year. I know as i've just looked at all the options for my daughter and I couldn't believe just how many there were.
I also have artist friends who have made a reasonable living for a number of years with a mixture of part time educational work, council funded community projects and funding from lottery grants. Now I'm not bemoaning that, it's almost certainly a positive thing, nor is it an easy living but the point I was making was that a living as an artist can be had without actually selling any works.
Add to this the the top end of the contemporary art market with Russian oligarchs and the vastly richer rich investing in what is effectively part of the stock market, then yes it is a much bigger business than it once was, have you seen how many galleries there are out there?
With regards to the linked article, my main gripe is the depths of meaning that the writer is able to distill from some of the work, but to be fair to the artists it may be seeing the body of work from which these images have been isolated, or the images in the flesh would be far more illuminating.
Gillian Wearing's and Joel Sternfeld's work I like. David Goldblatt's didn't ring a bell, but i was actually familiar with a lot of his images and loved them I just didn't know the name, and despite what you may think I'm actually quite open to contemporary art including abstract, but, and this was my point, I prefer photography that just works as a stand alone image and doesn't require all the underpinnings to make sense of it.
