Man, you need to warn me before I scroll past photos like that on a public machine with other people behind me.
Seriously, though, I knew there was going to be some debate, as I had a debate with myself before I posted the link. And I thought of just about every point that’s been presented so far, and agree with all of them (even the opposing views). The guy was all over the page, except for his hatred of the Dusseldorf Style Gone Wild, yet made a few points. It especially caught my attention that he called out Gursky by name (amongst others), when we were debating the $4.3 million dollar Gursky print the other day.
There are some things that I like, for example, your above photo is interesting to me; it makes me wonder who that guy is, where he’s going, what he’s doing, etc. But as you pointed out, I certainely wouldn’t buy it and hang it on my wall. I probably also wouldn’t buy the clich?d long exposure smoothed sea foam wooden dock in a bay, but again, that’s just me. What I tend to pull out of the article, though, is that with the proliferation of decent photography (and an upswell in generally great photography), it does seem like people are trying too hard to push there own work to stand out above the rest, including an overly descriptive emotional blurb. An example of this came from a few years back when I went to the Guggenheim with Pangolyn (who considered herself an artist, but studied and worked at computer graphic design because she understood that’s what was commercially viable). There was one wing celebrating lesbian artists, and the key gallery was simply polaroids of everyday life. When I look at art, I tend to only look at the art, then I’ll read the blurb if I care to see who did it. One particular polaroid in this gallery caught my attention as being utterly crap. It was a slightly out of focus photo of a four or five year old girl wearing a pink tutu and a USC t-shirt. She was standing on a chair, trying to reach for a cookie jar at the back of the counter. I said to Pangolyn “what the fuck is this doing here? These belong in a family photo album, not on the wall of the fucking Guggenheim.” She told me I had to read the description to understand the true meaning of the photo. The paragraph underneath it rambled on and on about how the girl’s struggle to reach the cookies was metaphorical to everyone living in the Los Angeles suburbs who are struggling to reach something better, but are held down by physical, geographic, and legal obstacles. I didn’t get it. It was a four year old trying to get the cookie jar.
This also ties into my already standing opinion that “fine art” is a genre dominated by a slightly widened nepotism. Like Matisse, for example. Personally, I think he sucks. Most of his “best known” works look like something you’d see in a high school gallery opening. But, he went to the right school, had the right mentors, and knew the right people, so his overusage of wide, sweeping flats of uniform color and his inability to accurately portray the human body were “creatively breaking the established rules.” Bullshit. I saw this in action when I was living in NY. When I left, I had just “cracked into” the albany art scene and was invited to show at a gallery. This was simply because I’d been hanging out and shooting with a friend who was already in “the scene” and personally knew the fellow who arranged most of the major galleries and shows. I was only invited after her recommendation and he went through some of my portfolio.
I guess it all boils down to the old saying “I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like.” Even in my own shooting, I don’t feel like I have a style, I shoot what interests me, and process the ones that I like (usually less than 10% of what gets shot), and try to use different techniques or equipment to see what happens. But I’ve had multiple people tell me that they know and love my style, and that they could pick one of my photos out of a stack of 100. But none could put into words what my style was.
So, I’ll keep shooting, and since it’s not my day job, nor do I intend it to be, if people like and want to buy, print, or publish my shit, okay, cool. If not, fuck ’em, they’re my photos anyway (although, it would be really nice to rake in seven figures from a single print).
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