Elliiot Erwitt comments on photographic quality, Ansel Adams, Minor White

A tense balance - if you're capable of fine work, you'll have strong opinions. But you have to have vigilance, and be aware continually. There's a fine line between strong opinions and rigid thinking. Flexible thinking and appraising is essential to creative work. Maybe it's essential to everything. We can become so certain and so convinced of our position that we back ourselves into a corner.

It's like the fine line between bravery and stupidity.

If you attempt to accomplish anything above average, people will criticize you; you can count on it. No one ever erected a statute to a critic.
 
Anthony said:
A tense balance - if you're capable of fine work, you'll have strong opinions. But you have to have vigilance, and be aware continually. There's a fine line between strong opinions and rigid thinking. Flexible thinking and appraising is essential to creative work. Maybe it's essential to everything. We can become so certain and so convinced of our position that we back ourselves into a corner.

It's like the fine line between bravery and stupidity.

If you attempt to accomplish anything above average, people will criticize you; you can count on it. No one ever erected a statute to a critic.
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The more modern approach is to simply redefine quality downward so as to make "greatness" accessible to the masses. There are no longer objective standards of quality. Just showing up gets you a participation trophy and no one is permitted to opine on the actual quaility of the artifact.

Virtually all art forms are now fully infected with this disease. Nowadays, everything is just "awesome" irrespective of how wretched the artifact actually is. I blame the Deconstructionist, Post Modern, and Post Structuralist theory schools for this infection of trash. Sadly, these days, the aforementioned critical schools are taught as holy writ, not only in art schools but also the almost all the other humanities.

A rather trenchant exposition of this can be found in Rand's novel "The Fountainhead" which exactly explores the elevation of the mundane and mediocre (in this case, architecture) to the detriment of the truly great. The tragedy is that it is more true today than it was when she wrote it.

Art is hard to get right. It is spectacularly difficult to do brilliantly. The answer to this is not to lower our standards and play semiotic or semantic word games. (This, incidently, is why I so dislike art in the service of socio-political propaganda. It is invariably dishonest, dumbed down, and decontextualized.)
 
Indeed. I have asked on other fora for someone to define or show me 'poor' or 'bad' conceptual art. Apparently it appears that there isn't any .....
 
Well, it's a bit early to judge.
All new movements can point backwards to now-accepted geniuses who were derided in their day. There's no short cut: we just have to wait for time's colander to remove the dross.
We might remember that a good deal of what we now unquestioningly call great art was made in the service of politico-religious propaganda.
I'm afraid it's an uncomfortable truth that the strength of an opinion has no correlation to its validity.

One lesson I learned with some difficulty, was that you don't have to like it all, but it's often worth trying to understand it. If you understand, you can hate it more precisely. I don't recommend hatred. Waste of your time and mine.

Having said all that, I'm inclined to agree that education for creatives seems to be being squashed into very narrow funnel of doubleplusgood duckspeak. I'm hoping that some talent will survive the squashing process. All we really know is that things will change. We might have to adapt.

Here's a reference to a statue of a critic: George Bernard Shaw. Always check your facts.

Talking Statues Dublin : GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

>Talking Statues Dublin : GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
www.talkingstatuesdublin.ie
 
Anthony said:
And Fred Picker knew an enormous amount about marketing and business. I'd always wished he'd written a book about that. Studying how he ran Zone VI Studios was more useful than a Harvard MBA - to me.
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Agreed. I still remember one evening my wife and I took Fred out to dinner where he laid out an entire new business idea! He said that he didn't have the time to start up a new venture, so he was giving it to us. ;) I was deep into my career, at the time, and the thought of moving to Vermont hadn't blossomed, yet. We did eventually move there, but the time had passed for his idea. Timing can be quite important in business, yes?
 
@David M I think that has little to do with what we like or hate. I don't like most of Stravinsky's compositions, but I understand and acknowledge his importance as an artist. This is fundamentally about whether we are willing to abandon any attempt to teach, curate, and assess quality or whether we will lay down on the altar of propagandist pieties, virtual signaling, and the hectoring smarmy "doubleplusgood duckspeak" which you note.

At this point, the movements in question are not particularly new and we can see the path of destruction they have already wreaked. There really isn't much to understand. When a crucifix resting in a container of urine constitutes art, there isn't some hidden or opaque meaning there. It's right in your face and it's a very low entertainment. Ditto Mappelthorpe's homoerotic photographs. And the trajectory is downward still. These days, a hipster millenial with a Holga is said to be making "important art". We are in the situation where a painting of dogs playing poker may well be the apogee of contemporary art.

I cannot recommend Roger Kimball's book The Rape Of The Masters highly enough as a guidebook to this insanity. Kimball takes us on a tour of the modern academy and its full on assault on beauty and meaning. By turns, the book is funny, sad, and infuriating. If you love art, you owe yourself this read. (Kimball is - to my mind anyway - one of the very best critics writing today.)

P.S. On an amusing side note...

In the 1970-80s, the researchers at Bell Labs were doing work in computer processing of text. They created one program that emitted grammatically correct English following the usual rules of sentence construction, but that had absolutely no semantic meaning or content. An example might be something like, The Lord is my shepherd, but my ball peen hammers require eggplant curtains.

By the time this work was underway, Jacques Derrida's writing had taken the intelligentsia around the world by storm. His stuff was (and remains) a first class example of the incoherent and opaque "duckspeak" to which you refer. Predictably, the academy swarmed to it and reams of drivel proceeded from this 'research'.

The boys at Bell Labs took a copy of Derrida's book and ran it through their nonsense generator. They then proceeded to announce to the world that this was the 2nd installment of Derrida's work. The academy jumped to it. There were learned disquisitions and deep analysis of the material. I heard - from one of the perpetrators - that there were even Ph.D. dissertations being written based on this "second work". Eventually, they confessed their prank and the level of craziness returned to normal.

When you destroy meaning - whether in words, images, or even just thought - you will accept pretty much anything as "great" from Monet to the coffee stains on your desk.

For several other really fun examples of exploiting this sort of thing, see:

Sokal affair - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

www.rt.com

Academics 'rewrite' Mein Kampf using radical feminist language, paper accepted

A trio of frustrated academics has perpetrated an elaborate hoax exposing malpractice within academic research by submitting 20 bizarre and deliberately ridiculous papers for publication, several of which were accepted.
www.rt.com www.rt.com
 
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Thank you. I've heard of the nonsense generator. An excellent prank and very instructive.
Can't disagree with you, but "...the world is going to Hell in a handcart" has been a constant complaint down the centuries. No doubt highly-skilled flint-knappers bemoaned that new-fangled bronze – "you just pour it in a mould!"
It's another cliché to mention the Impressionists, so I won't.

Having found a statue of a critic with ease, (another handy cliché lost!) I thought I'd look for a statue of a photographer.
So far, I've failed, or rather Google has. What conclusion can we draw from this? If there is one, I'd like to know.
 
David M said:
Thank you. I've heard of the nonsense generator. An excellent prank and very instructive.
Can't disagree with you, but "...the world is going to Hell in a handcart" has been a constant complaint down the centuries. No doubt highly-skilled flint-knappers bemoaned that new-fangled bronze – "you just pour it in a mould!"
It's another cliché to mention the Impressionists, so I won't.

Having found a statue of a critic with ease, (another handy cliché lost!) I thought I'd look for a statue of a photographer.
So far, I've failed, or rather Google has. What conclusion can we draw from this? If there is one, I'd like to know.
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I stipulate - without reservation - that it is the province of us seasoned citizens to grumble about change. But I maintain what's going on now is more than just ordinary cultural flux.
 
Oh yes! Grumbling is both a duty and a pleasure.

Could it be that what you are calling cultural flux is greatly accelerated and amplified by this new-fangled internet thingie? I think we should exclude politics on this forum, but we've seen some startling examples in one very large country in the last four years.
I'm most certainly not encouraging anyone respond to this. I've may have said too much already, but only by way of illustration.
 
David M said:
Oh yes! Grumbling is both a duty and a pleasure.

Could it be that what you are calling cultural flux is greatly accelerated and amplified by this new-fangled internet thingie? I think we should exclude politics on this forum, but we've seen some startling examples in one very large country in the last four years.
I'm most certainly not encouraging anyone respond to this. I've may have said too much already, but only by way of illustration.
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Politics plays a role, to be sure, but it is a follower, not a leader. That it to say, the political environment reflects the culture, the culture isn't primarily defined by politics. In shorthand, we get the politics the culture asks for.

And, yes, the internet reports things (often/mostly incompletely and incorrectly) with breathless near realtime cycles. Even so, all that's changing there is the rate of cultural change not the substance of it, I don't think.

I am not one of those people who thinks Things were better back in MY day. That is the height of hubris and self-delusion. But the one thing that actually is worse today is the almost complete abandonment of the idea of objective truth and aesthetic beauty. If I have to go to one more "leadership training" seminar in which I am exhorted to Speak your truth, I may become clinically unbalanced.

People who love art understand that there is not a perfectly objective definition of "good" art, but there are some pretty strong hints. Among them include craft, structure, emotive power, and durability. We abandon these precepts to our own detriment. Worse still, substituting these with My Personal Truth (tm) is philosophically bankrupt, intellectually lazy, and deeply destructive. (Again, I highly recommend Rand's Fountainhead as a riproaring exposition of this very mindset.)

In my opinion - and that's all it is, I can't prove it except by pointing to examples - pretty much all of this is driven by people (millennials leap to mind, but there are many others) who wish to feel successful without any real effort, striving, failure, or suffering. But that is the essential nature of all great accomplishment, artistic or otherwise, which requires exactly those things. The My Personal Truth (tm) nonsense is just a way to try to cheat Reality to get the laurels of success without actually having to accomplish anything.

P.S. One last thing and I shall step away from the pulpit. The beginning- and end of this stuff lies in the academy. It is in the ivory tower that young people get dipped in this awful goo. It is pervasive across the entirety of the Humanities and it is most evident in the so-called schools of "Education". It is my observation - confirmed anecdotally by my acquaintances - that the intellectual ghetto of any university is its School Of Education. These are the people to whom we entrust our youngsters, but this is the very first place in which truth, beauty, ethics, and work disciplines are being relativized or outright dismissed as non-existent or unimportant. Confirmation bias? Maybe, but the preponderance of observable evidence says otherwise. (This is why I so highly recommend Kimball's Rape Of The Masters. It is a very deep dive into the arts education ghetto.)
 
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Well, yes.
Truth becomes a rather fugitive thing when you examine it.
A brief and superficial example...
In front of us are three apples. I say there are three apples. You as if there might be smaller apples hidden behind. I check and show you there are not. You ask if it might be one apple and two mirrors. I demonstrate that there are not. So far, our description – three apples – is true. Now I tell you they are Granny Smith apples and this time you disagree and claim they are Golden Delicious. Both are green varieties. We can resolve this by appealing to an outside expert and we go to Brogdale, who resolve the matter for us. Now we can tell a bit more truth. We might say we are more accurate.
Now you say you don't like apples. This looks like Your Truth rearing its head but it isn't. It's a fact about you. It's a public fact, like your height and not your property.
[In all this, I don't mean you personally, we could reverse the personal pronouns without affecting the argument. I could have used Alice and Bob.]
When people use My Truth, as far as I can see, they mean My Belief. Today, the word truth holds much more prestige than belief so they say Truth. This is rather like putting your Aldi shopping in a Harrods carrier bag.
With you, I do deplore the capture of photographic education by moralists. It is sometimes justified by pointing to the history of photographic education. Once upon a time it was almost wholly technical, turning out skilled technicians. (I applaud skill in all its forms.) There was a desire for more, for a broader curriculum. We might think that was a good idea.
Sadly for us, a great deal else was imported. The teaching of skills was downgraded. Personal expression was emphasised. Great social engagement encouraged. We have seen the results.
Another factor that we haven't mentioned is funding. Many photographer seek funding for their projects and they need to write applications for this. Edward Weston, I believe wrote "...continue my work..." but things are much more competitive today. What could be more tempting to fund-givers than the claim that a project will do some good in the world? I believe this is another factor in skewing the field towards overt moralism.

And why are they called Millennials anyway? None of them were born on Jan 1 2000. (Or, for chronological pedants, Jan 1 2001.)

I've banged on for too long. Perhaps we should put the topic to bed.
 
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Thank you. I suspect that we have no major disagreement. I look forward to your next posts.
 
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