Robert - This is cobblers, isn't it? "Arty chap who thought he was good at photography is distressed to find, when he joins a social-photo-sharing site, that everyone else's photos look as good as his: he therefore concludes that digital photography, or the photo-sharing site, or both, must be some kind of con-trick, and vows never to use a digital camera again."
"There I was, having fun snapping water lilies, when I realised that about a hundred people were doing the same thing. Grannies, kids, babies, all with cameras and a sense of being artists..." What's wrong with this is firstly the supposition that if everybody is doing it then it can't be valuable. Secondly, the equally ill-considered idea that everybody else must have the same "sense of being artists" - as he puts it elsewhere in the article, "I realised that I was buying into the same delusion of grandeur as everyone else". Actually, he's the one with delusions of grandeur, and most of the other people using the photo-sharing site, or snapping the water-lilies at Kew Gardens, probably don't have them at all. It's an inconvenient fact, for those of us with artistic pretensions, that the digital revolution has allowed Joe and Jennifer Public to get their stuff published online as easily as we can do it ourselves. If they want to claim that their stuff is more articistically valuable than ours - in fact if they want to claim that our stuff's just boring - then there's very little we can do about it. We can't force them to go back to school or college and learn some proper art appreciation until they begin to understand that they've got it all wrong and our stuff is actually better than theirs. We'd bloody well like to, but we can't. But most of the time they don't claim to be better than us at all. In fact most of the time they don't make any claims of any kind, and they're not even aware of our existence. They just nark us by getting viewing-figures a thousand times bigger than ours. Some guy in a market sings "One pound fish", gets onto YouTube and becomes a superstar (albeit only for a few weeks or months), while other people with proper educations and proper sets of artistic credentials and ideas will labour their whole lives to produce "worthwhile" stuff and get nothing more than a few flickers of recognition now and again. Well, that's just the way it goes. Personally I think it's a mistake to conclude that there must be something wrong with the guy who sings "One pound fish", or with the society that takes such a shine to him. It may seem unfair that he should get such a lot of recognition by a kind of freak of chance, whereas here we are expending blood, sweat, tears, talent, time and brainpower on our work and most people aren't even paying a blind bit of attention - but if you really believe in what you're doing, if you really get some satisfaction out of it, or if you just plain can't imagine life without it, then you'll keep doing it anyhow, even if you never earn a penny or get a single thumbs-up. If you don't have that belief, then like the Guardian's art-critic you'll probably conclude, rather hysterically, that the whole thing must be some kind of con-trick, and give it up in disgust. - Edward _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
