My rant is inspired by the recent edition of Next Level, an “art/photography/ideas” magazine. An article detailing the work of Jorma Puranen consists of photographs of portraits painted in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but “shot improperly”.
I’ve always had this yin-yang thing about art, or rather “Art.” I’m not necessarily an old fart with a predilection for the masters but I do believe that art, in whatever form it takes, requires a discerning eye (or ear) and some technical talent. Casting aside such easy and cheap shots at works like Voice of Fire or the flesh dress thing, which is so abstract and sometimes just plain disturbing, there is an underlying though somewhat obscured trend here. Some might call it the democratization of art — a process whereby being labelled an artist is a self-referential thing. You become an artist when you call yourself an artist.
Formerly, to be an artist meant you could carry a tune, draw a face or a tree, carve something recognizable by human beings. Formerly, when someone painted a bunch a straight beige lines on a slightly beiger background, we’d be more likely to diagnose him with OCD than call her an artist and pay big bucks for the work.
My rant is inspired by the recent edition of Next Level, an “art/photography/ideas” magazine. An article detailing the work of Jorma Puranen consists of photographs of portraits painted in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but “shot improperly”. By “improperly”, the author means that the photos were improperly lit Really badly lit. In most of the photos you see very little detail of the actual painting, just a bad reflection… like a tourist might take of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.
The article’s author gushes that Puranen “decodes the historical object and educates the contemporary eye to look at the painted face, the person, the portait, which is always — even in an idealized form — a representation of something real, something that once existed…”
I see no ‘decoding’ here…just obfuscation, by both the photographer and the writer. By photographing what amount to the surface texture of the painting and the reflection of the ancient varnishes, the ‘artist’ devaluates the true artist’s work in order to reimagine a vision that pushes the boundaries separating the random chaos of poorly executed photographs and truly pioneering artistic expression. The writer, an art historian, pushes the boundary even further by presenting the work as artistic genius that recalls “Plato’s ideas of art as a mere reflection of reality, the reality in reflections.” Such non-sensical and whimsically ambiguous terms work fine in the museum, but it doesn’t inspire me to copy-cat the technique and rush out to make “improper” photos.
I still believe in some basic rules of art — and equally believe that rules are made to be broken. But let’s use the same standards as the real rules. Sometimes experiments fail…and fail horribly. Very few out of focus, poorly lit, crooked photographs deserved to be labelled as ‘artistic’. Hasn’t Chauncy, the gardener, taught us anything?
There is some amazing cutting-edge stuff out there. I’m thinking Tony Fouse, Susanna Majuri and the late Art Kane. When stuff looks like your 4 year could have painted it or your uncle could have snapped it with his Nikon Coolpix, I think art is devalued. I also think the art of critiquing is devalued when someone pours effervescent praise on an effort that should not have ventured much further than the drawing table. Every branch of human endeavour has flops, even Thomas Edison hit a false not when he created the concrete piano. Let’s set the standard higher.