On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 11:07:59AM +0100, AlunFoto scripsit: > Graydon, > I wrote about _trust_, not truth. Trust is the thing that builds a > bridge of consensus between our individual perceptions of reality, > isn't it? :-)
I wouldn't say so, no. I'd say that's either facts (arrived at in falsifiable, public ways) or a presumption of the absence of malice. Facts about perception exist, but aren't particularly useful in a context of art. Advertising *never* comes with a presumption of the absence of malice, at least from my corner, but this has layers. Advertising is about creating or strengthening an insecurity and then offering (or implying) a solution. That's a willingness to mess with my head and/or cashflow, but it's not the same as "do this or we club you with sticks" malice. The "creating insecurity" part also varies widely; the folks advertising pay-day loans (and blatantly lying about low rates) are different from the Pentax ad that implies $EXPENSIVE_LENS will improve your photography, at least in as much as the folks responsible for the Pentax ad can presume you already know that $EXPENSIVE_LENS cannot improve your photography. Art is an attempt to produce a pattern of emotional reaction in the viewer (for photography, anyway, viewer); this more or less requires that you set out to mess with someone's head in creating art. You might, as a specific individual artist, build up some trust over time about how you're going to do that, but it's very easy to lose. (Pick any popular art -- book, tv, movie, music... -- and find the wailing when the artist(s) do something different, or different than expected...) So I'd say you can, maybe, trust an individual to be pursuing their artistic vision, but you can't sensibly trust that you know what that is (since they might not, and it will change with time) or that it's necessarily good for you. (There are, after all, all those folks out there on the net apparently sincerely pursuing an artistic vision of wanting to make people spork their eyeballs out.) So I think "how do I react to this?" is a much more useful question than "do I trust this artist? what were they trying to do?" -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
