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Art vs. Non Art
updated: Jan 05, 2013, 4:00 PM
By Steve McGovern
So I woke up this morning thinking about the discussion on Edhat this week about art vs. not-art. The
argument is that art is painting, drawing, sculpturing, but not photography. Art is created from the
depths of an artist's mind. Photographs are simply the result of pointing a camera at something and
pushing a button. Anybody can take pictures.
I can't decide the issue for others, just for me. I mean, would Christo's creations be art without the
photographs of it? He drapes things, extends cloth for miles over hilly country, or whatever, and then
takes pictures of it. Is the project the art? Are the photographs of it the art? Most of us will never see
the real thing, just the pictures. Hard for me to separate the the "art" from the photos of it.
I take thousands of photos every year and I think some of it is fairly artsy, so I think photography CAN
be art... but sometimes it's just a pretty picture. For me it comes down to this: Art is not art BECAUSE it
leaps fully formed from someone's mind. In my opinion, some of the stuff Picasso did was junk. On the
other hand, some of Ansel Adam's pictures were snapshots. What it comes down to is this: There is
nowhere else locally, other than Edhat, where 1000 people will look at a photograph taken by an
amateur photographer. Sometimes, people even say nice things about them. If someone says
something negative about mine, I don't care. I will look at it again to see if they might be right, but in
the end, if I like it, I don't care about negative comments.
I can't draw. I can't sculpt. I can't paint (mostly because I can't draw). So, I take pictures. I don't make
any money doing it. I shoot something I think is interesting and then I might work with it in Photoshop
or, at least, iPhoto and I like to think I improve it. Sometimes, I make it look entirely different than it did
when I pointed my camera at it. If I don't like the result, I get rid of it. I wish some "artists" were as
discerning. More than that, I wish some art lovers were more discerning.
Didn't want to spend too much time on something that really doesn't matter. Instead, I went out and
took some pretty pictures. Not trying to make art. I just like the colors.
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