Holy shit, guys, I'm just taking fuckin' pictures, you know?
Sounds like a MARK! with a little editing.
Kenneth Waller
http://www.tinyurl.com/272u2f
----- Original Message -----
From: "frank theriault" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Ethics of Manipulation (was: Re: Perspective control (was:
PESO:Church tower))
On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Graydon <[email protected]> wrote:
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?"
Holy shit, guys, I'm just taking fuckin' pictures, you know?
cheers,
frank
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