Re: [Leica] Re: Miscellany

[david place <dvplace@top.net>]

Paul ,,, thanks for the book reccomendation ..... I was about to check amazon
for the isbn number but you gave that to ... (? a complete sort of guy ?) ....
I'll call my local book dealer on monday and get back to you after some reading
... good imaging, dplace

Paul and Paula Butzi wrote:

> Regarding the question "What is art?", I suspect that we're unlikely to
> improve
> on the words of Louis Armstrong.  When asked "What is Jazz?", he replied
> "If you have to ask, you'll never know."
>
> In the final analysis, "Is it art?" is an uninteresting question compared to
> other possibilities: Does it move me?  Will it move you?  Does it make you
> angry, sad, elated?  Is it beautiful?  Are people changed by it?  Is the
> change permanent?  Positive?
>
> Henry James suggested the following questions might be applied to
> art: What was the artist trying to achieve?  Did he/she succeed?
> Was it worth it?
>
> Re criticism/feedback:
>
> It's important to keep the feedback you get in perspective.  If you take a
> dozen photographs, and ask six people to select the six best images, you'll
> get eight different answers.  Some of the images that one person intensely
> dislikes will be the favorites of someone else.  It's neither possible nor
> desirable to produce images which please everyone.  I'd suggest that
> it *is* important to produce images which are meaningful to *you*.
>
> Likewise, remember that if you want to do extraordinary work, then it will
> *by definition* be different from what everyone else does.  That's fine, but
> I guarantee that some people will not like it just because it's different.
> And
> like most things, there is a converse danger - the fact that it's different
> doesn't make it good.  We've all seen art that was done with the primary
> goal of being 'different'.
>
> Finally, criticism becomes a little easier to handle if you keep in mind
> the words of David Bayles and Ted Orland in "Art and Fear" - the function
> of ninety-nine percent of your art is to teach you how to make the one
> percent that soars.  To make one piece of good art, you need to be willing
> to make a lot of bad art, and learn from doing it.  The question shouldn't
> be "Is it good?" but rather "Does it enable you to move closer to making
> the work that *is* good?"
>
> (What?  You haven't read "Art and Fear"?  What the hell are you doing
> reading this drivel written by me?  You should be driving to the bookstore
> to pick up your own copy of the best book ever written on artistic
> process, and clearing your schedule to read it!  ISBN 0-88496-379-9,
> Capra Press, Santa Barbara.)
>
> -Paul