I do not want to get anyone's backup as all opions are relevant but will someone who does know their arse from their elbow please explain to me exactly what defines an image as art or does not.
First you have to define what you mean by art. Look it up in a dictionary, and you'll see something along the lines of "Application of skill, imagination and creativity" or some such. However, it's worth noting that "art" as a general term does mean this... however, the meaning changes with time. Go back 200 years and it would mean exactly that if applied to anything that's not utile. So a painting was art if done with skill, creativity and imagination. That still is the case, but since the post-modern era, we tend to categorise that as decorative art now. A Rembrandt is still a Rembrandt, and still utterly superb of course, but it's admired historically. You're unlikely to be able to paint in that style and expect your work to receive the same acclaim now though. Art changes, and now there's an expectation from art that goes beyond the decorative to either challenge, communicate or enlighten.. possibly shock as well delight.. but essentially it's about what the work does as much as how it does it. So, to take landscape photography for example. Seeing as these two have been brought up in this thread already, let's look at Lik vs. Burtinsky.
Rather than theorise and link to academic articles no one can be arsed reading, I'll just show you.
Peter Lik took this.....
http://scottreither.com/blogwp/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/WHISPERING-WINDS-2012.WEBSITE2.jpg
However, it does nothing. It's a nice picture of a canyon in... Utah or some such place. It's nice isn't it? What else is it? Nothing. It was taken for no reason other than to be pretty, but furthermore, it challenges nothing. Not even itself. It's composition strictly obeys rules, it was designed to simply be a pastiche of every other image taken in Canyonlands national park. There are thousands of these on Flickr. So how can this be art? Let's look at this again.
Here's a Lik
Here's a random from the internet
and another
and another
and another
and another
and another
and another
and another
and another
and another
and another
Without a word of a lie... I could carry on pasting in links to the same identical image for days on end without a rest, sleep or even a toilet break. There are hundreds of thousands of identical images taken from the same damned place. It wouldn't surprise me if the ground has eroded into three little circles with so many damned tripods being placed in the same space.
How is that art? Some would say there's skill.. but is there? Turn up, wait for sunset... take a pic. It may well be decorative art... but so are cheap prints of sentimental 19th century water colours you can buy in gift shops in Cumbria. Nice things to hang on a wall.
This is not art, and hasn't been for some considerable time. It does nothing, says nothing, challenges nothing, illustrates nothing, does not enlighten, surprise, shock.... it doesn't even move you any more, because it's such a cliché of itself.
Can you see why Lik is NOT an artist now, and why his work is just derivative pap?
Now let's look at Burtinsky...
http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/site...mage_galleries/Tailings_Gallery/TLG_34_96.jpg
Even from the outset.... from the way he even describes the work, here is someone who THINKS about what he's doing... Industrial Sublime. It's more than words.. it's someone who understand more than just his subject, he understands what art should be doing. He's tapping into the sublime.. the idea of overwhelming grandeur, but fear and isolation... What Joseph Addison described as "an agreeable kind of horror". Burtinsky knows this... he's educated, and will fully understand the Sublime. He's cleverly pitting the power of beauty against the viewer... he's pulling the same strings... it's "wow"... but that's not enough. That's easy... any fool can do that. He's taking the well used trope of "nature" and "beauty" and this outdated idea of "Natural" and "wilderness" and showing it for what it is... bull****. Canyonlands national park unbridled nature? Nonsense.... if Shell found shale gas under it, they'd lay waste to it in pretty short order. There IS no unbridled wilderness... it's a myth. So he's researched, he's travelled, and he's sought out places where there's still beauty and powerful imagery to be found, but created not by nature, but by us - beauty in the midst of destruction and decay.... in this case, strip mining for Nickel in Canada.
I would show you other images that are similar... except, and here's the difference... there are very few. Sure, there are snapshots of Nickel mines and Nickel tailings all over the web, but no ranks of amateur photographers queuing up to shoot them like there are at Canyonlands. Why's that? Because it required imagination and vision to even consider making beauty from such a subject. Mr Amateur who wants a pretty picture, goes somewhere pretty. He'd never consider going to a Nickel mine in Ontario.
So.. in the post-modern era we're in.. Art needs purpose, and purpose is equally as important, if not more important than aesthetic.
So the uneducated will see work like
Barbera Kruger's and just think... that's crap... just some text pasted over an image.. anyone can do that. Anyone didn't though. Anyone didn't think to use the powerful combination of images and text (the tools of advertising you're all subjected to) in order to question the gender based power structures that rule us all on a daily basis. "Who's want that on their wall"? No one!.. what does that matter? "It's ugly"... Yes... a patriarchal ruling hegemony IS ugly.
Ok.... so maybe Kruger's a bit of a contrast from Burtinsky... and an aquired taste... let's see....
Ingrid Pollard
Part landscape, part documentary. No attempt to be pretty, but certainly interesting. Why are we surprised when we see a black person somewhere like rural Cumbria? I own a cabin just outside Ambleside, I know the Lakes well... you hardly ever DO see black people, and when you do, I'm shamed to say, I'm surprised.. like... why are they here? It's an awful thing to think, but it's borne not from racism, but surprise. We as a culture have urbanised the black person. You can't argue with that... we have. As a result, black people tend to segregate themselves unconsciously. How many black farmers do you know? How many black crofters, blacksmiths, thatchers? Rural life and the black man are not easy bedfellows. This is what Pollard is doing here... examining why she feels alienated in her own land. She's British.. as British as you and I, yet feels this way. It needs talking about, so she talks about it.. with pictures. This is why it's art. This isn't someone looking to take a pretty landscape, and why should she? She feels that landscape doesn't represent her in any way. Despite being HER landscape as much as yours, she keenly feels some big issues few consider. Territory... the POLITICS of the landscape.
Amateurs would do this....
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01761/lake_1761594b.jpg
That's not art. It says precisely nothing. Does nothing... and it's already been done a million times over. It's not art. It's just a photograph.
I hope this helps.
