Technology in "art" is good thing.....But it is true that our standards for what is art have definitly degraded in a way, have become lazy. You can crap in a box and call it art nowadays. I think it all started with the post-modernism movement, where the meaning became more important than the craft, instead of being equal, especially in architecture. Which is why i have a love/hate relationship w/ Frank Gehry. His building are works of art, but they don't function well as buildings. I've heard over and over again that the tenents of his buildings aren't comfortable in spaces. There's tons hot and cold zones and some people have even suffered vertigo in some of his buildings. Plus, it seems like in America that our technology isn't geared always to make us smarter, just lazy.............
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Is Photography Dead?
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We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such "performance animation" films as "Beowulf," overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party's exten-sion. Even sculpture has adopted digital "rapid prototyping" technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn't it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?
Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way.
© 2007
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