Re: [Leica] Good Pitchurs

[Donal Philby <donalphilby@earthlink.net>]

Thomas Kachadurian wrote:
> 
> Mike: 
> While I value what you said about seeing, I am troubled you your view of
> the uninitiated. This assertion: "generally, 95% of the population wouldn't
> know a really good photograph if it were an alligator and bit them on the
> ass." 
> 
> You can try all you want to complicated art, and lift up one ideal as
> loftier than the other, but history will always have it's say, and history
> values beauty, not things that need to be explained and defended.

Tom, Mike, et al,
Some years ago best selling author Dean Koonz wrote a book on writing
best sellers.  He said we could try to write the Great Novel, beloved of
critics, if we like, but it most likely wouldn't stand the test of
time.  Appealing to the masses, writing what they understand is not
necessarily crass.

He speaks of a prolific English writer, one of the first pulp fiction
practitioners, who critics panned as simplistic, lowest common
denominator, unsophisticated and not worthy of a reader's time.  The
writer, of course, was Charles Dickens.

And if anyone would rather read John Barth instead of Charles Dickens,
well, I'm sorry for you.  The point Koonz was making was that sometimes
art is popular because it touches universal feelings and experiences. 
But that doesn't make it crass.   There is no book which touches me
more, inspires more hope, more compassion, more joy than the Family of
Man.  Even after all these years.  And it aims, by design or not,
directly at the 95%.  

donal

P.S.:  The real question is where do Coca Cola or MacDonald's
advertising images aim?  and how do they differ from the feelings of
many picture in the Family of Man??  Or how differ in value (however you
measure that)?
- -- 
Donal Philby
San Diego
http://www.donalphilby.com