[Leica] Is photography art?

[Mark Rabiner]

Doing an "edition" is foreign to photography as the negative was good for
unlimited prints as certainly would be a digital file. Any other graphics
printmaking process had a limited run by nature of its materials. This is
not photography's nature. And it turns out the gallery people find that
decidedly bad for business.
This was a controversy decades back and most of the key people I admired
considered destroying ones neg after a run to bring the prices up be an
abomination. A very few did it. But now decades later its caught on.
Now I'm noticing as I go to galleries during the year and the big AIPAD show
with a hundred photo galleries from all over the world once a year that this
kind of stuff is coming back. A print will have a number 6/14. The sixed
print out of a run of 14.
Wow that bums me out!
What the insurance companies did to the practice of medicine the gallery
owners are doing to photography. Corrupting it. Turning it into a crass
joke.


On 4/5/15 7:42 PM, "George Lottermoser" <george.imagist at icloud.com> wrote:

> Of course blue chip artists like James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, and hundreds
> of others fly in the face of many of your "claims" to a hierarchy of Fine Art.
> Not to mention the fact that Rembrandt, Durer and hundreds of other "Classical
> Masters" were print makers as well as painters and draftsmen; who earned their
> keep as portraitists to royalty; and illustrators for the church. And our most
> renowned sculptors also cast multiple bronze sculptures as well as totally
> utilitarian doors, gates, portrait busts, etc.. And the exceptions to your
> formulaic assessment go on and on and on through the history of "Fine Art"
> going all the way back to the cave illustrations and the Venus of Willendorf.
> 
> We can off our gratitude to the Fine Artists who make the Fine Art, using any
> and all media available to them, in every conceivable combination.
> 
> Even as the critics and curators attempt to categorize, pigeon hole and
> understand what they're looking at, reading, and listening to.
> 
> a note off the iPad, George
> 
> On Mar 23, 2015, at 9:32 AM, Larry Zeitlin via LUG <lug at leica-users.org>
> wrote:
> 
>>    Is photography art? I depends on whom you ask. I serve as an art critic
>> for several New York state regional newspapers and have plenty of opportunity
>> to visit art and photo shows. Artists, critics and show curators have an
>> implicit hierarchy of visual art roughly arranged in inverse relationship to
>> the utility of the effort. Fine art is art with no apparent purpose except
>> its own being. It is nice to look at but no one NEEDS fine art. At the top of
>> the list are the painters who work in oils, next are the watercolorists
>> followed by those who work in collage. Near the bottom of the list are
>> etchers, printmakers and photographers. Indeed some curators refuse to let
>> photographs be exhibited in art shows at all, consigning them to the purdah
>> of photo shows.
>>    Lower on the list, in a separate category, are the applied arts. This is
>> "art" with some functional use. The work of most photographic professionals,
>> especially those whose pictures adorn magazines, advertisements, newspapers,
>> etc. fall into this category. Architects are applied artists too,
>> differentiated from sculptors because buildings have a use apart from being
>> merely decorative. Commercial artists are clearly applied artists no matter
>> how good their work. I know whereof I speak. I live in Westchester near the
>> border of Connecticuit and advertising and commercial painters and
>> photographers are as common as dust mites.
>>    At the bottom of the list are craftsmen. Crafts are artistic creations
>> with a utilitarian purpose. It takes just as much skill to design a Barcelona
>> chair or fabricate a fine pair of shoes as it does to make a painting except
>> it is not considered "art." Most art venues will simply not exhibit crafts
>> except during the holiday season where they hope to make a lot of sales.?
>>    For the last 50 years I have had a grasshopper weathervane fastened to the
>> chimney of my house. It is a beautifully crafted sculpture of hammered copper
>> made by the descendants of the very craftsmen who made the similar
>> weathervane that adorns Faneuil Hall in Boston. If polished and exhibited as
>> art it would be accepted by almost any art show but as a weathervane it has a
>> function. It is not considered art but craft. I.e not acceptable as "art."
>>    The curse of photography (and etching and printmaking) is its
>> reproducibility. Copies of the work can be made virtually identical to the
>> original except not bearing the fingerprint of the artist. This caps the
>> appreciation value of the original. There is a financial virtue in destroying
>> the plates or negatives. While some photos can sell for a lot of money, the
>> highest price paid for a painting is 60 times the highest price paid for a
>> photograph. See Wikipedia for comparative pricing.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_photographs
>>    Those of you that consider photographs fine art remember that amongst
>> artists it is considered a pretend art. A pseudo mechanical (OK digital)
>> process of capturiing an image. At best it is an applied art.
>>    All of which reminds me of that old joke:?A young man buys himself a boat
>> and a Captain's hat. He says to his mother, "Now I'm a Captain."
>>    His mother responds "You call yourself a Captain and I call you a Captain.
>> But do real Captains call you a Captain?"
>> 
>> 
>>    Larry Z (a highly educated and reasonable photographer)
>> 
>> 
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> 
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-- 
Mark William Rabiner
Photographer
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/lugalrabs/