[Leica] Is photography art?

[lrzeitlin at aol.com]

 	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)