Duh.
I feel somewhat slow to have figured out the obvious. In my previous postings re what constitutes a real wall-hanger piece of art from a large postcard, I went off on several side roads while missing the main one.
Beautiful photos of beautiful things are rarely fine art. They're nice, they are interesting to look at for a minute or even less, but how many nice photos of the Grand Canyon or a beautiful rose do you want to look at? With today's cameras, anyone can take them.
But when you look at photos that are obviously genuine art, what gradually becomes clear is that their subject matter is NOT obvious. In fact, the art in them is the skill to make a beautiful picture of a non-beautiful subject. To be able to find the beauty in a piece of junkyard metal piping is art; to take a portrait not of a model but of an ordinary person in a way that touches you is also art. A rainy street and an empty park bench can suddenly become beautiful when seen in the right way. Finding the non-obvious subjects and making them interesting and beautiful in their own way is the secret.
Ahem. The triumphant rediscovery of the obvious. That would be my middle name if the phrase were a little shorter. Anyhow, I'm satisfied with this first step in focusing what I want to do with my camera.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Bailing Out Corporations
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I just want to add my two-cents worth to the increasingly heated national debate re the economy.
I listened to a debate on public radio about a recent decision by the "Wages Czar", who issued an edict that corporations who had taken bail-out funds from the government would have a cap on their salaries. The cap represented a sizable down-sizing of their income, on the order of a 90% reduction. The response by the debater (name unremembered) was that these executives had counted on their incomes and had incurred debts which they would be unable to pay after the downsizing; as a result, the pundit added, they would likely quit their jobs and leave the corporations in the lurch.
Losing income has happened to a lot of people in the US. I feel unable to muster up any sympathy for someone whose income decreased from 5 million to 5oo,ooo. But that's really missing the point, I think. The money being grossly overpaid to these CEOs, under whose frigging brilliant leadership their corporations were disintegrating, was not voted by the stockholders. Yet the money paid to the CEOs was money that could have been distributed to the stockholders, who were actually not only entitled to some of that money but who were disenfranchised of their right to limit the salaries of the CEO.
The captain of a ship who leads the ship into an iceberg doesn't get a reward. Perhaps going down with the ship is a viable alternative. I understand the argument that if the corporations collapsed the economy would be further damaged. However, please not that the economy was already damaged severely by the greed of the CEOs; we just hadn't "taken the loss" yet. There were and are other alternatives to bailing out failing operations. For instance, as in the Telco corporate problems, perhaps corporations could be split up or dismantled into smaller but more profitable enterprises. Let the CEO of a failed corporation be dumped without compensation and without stock options. They should not be rewarded for failure caused by poor judgment and greed. Too bad if they can't pay for the villa in Capri.
And let's not forget that we carry some responsibility for the current debacle. Many people bought houses that were grossly over-appraised, knowing the house was not worth the loan. People over-bought stock on the market expecting a never-ceasing increase in value. Some fought for raises from companies barely surviving, as in the aircraft industry, even forcing some companies that paid their salaries into failure. We've lost the steel business for the same reason; short-sighted greed carried out to the point of self-destruction. We lost the automobile business the same way; greedy people make high prices and lazy ones have poor workmanship. Result: business gone elsewhere. So it's not just the CEOs who are at fault.
We can't survive as an economy unless we produce. We are becoming a service-provider country, with few real products of our own. We don't even produce as much of the raw materials as we used to. We send out the money; we ship in the products. People in other countries are benefited, but we are poorer because we can't compete in the open market for goods or services. This creates a steady downward decline with corrupt managers and politicians attempting to profit on the way. I suppose they hope to make it to that villa in Capri before the catastrophe.
I listened to a debate on public radio about a recent decision by the "Wages Czar", who issued an edict that corporations who had taken bail-out funds from the government would have a cap on their salaries. The cap represented a sizable down-sizing of their income, on the order of a 90% reduction. The response by the debater (name unremembered) was that these executives had counted on their incomes and had incurred debts which they would be unable to pay after the downsizing; as a result, the pundit added, they would likely quit their jobs and leave the corporations in the lurch.
Losing income has happened to a lot of people in the US. I feel unable to muster up any sympathy for someone whose income decreased from 5 million to 5oo,ooo. But that's really missing the point, I think. The money being grossly overpaid to these CEOs, under whose frigging brilliant leadership their corporations were disintegrating, was not voted by the stockholders. Yet the money paid to the CEOs was money that could have been distributed to the stockholders, who were actually not only entitled to some of that money but who were disenfranchised of their right to limit the salaries of the CEO.
The captain of a ship who leads the ship into an iceberg doesn't get a reward. Perhaps going down with the ship is a viable alternative. I understand the argument that if the corporations collapsed the economy would be further damaged. However, please not that the economy was already damaged severely by the greed of the CEOs; we just hadn't "taken the loss" yet. There were and are other alternatives to bailing out failing operations. For instance, as in the Telco corporate problems, perhaps corporations could be split up or dismantled into smaller but more profitable enterprises. Let the CEO of a failed corporation be dumped without compensation and without stock options. They should not be rewarded for failure caused by poor judgment and greed. Too bad if they can't pay for the villa in Capri.
And let's not forget that we carry some responsibility for the current debacle. Many people bought houses that were grossly over-appraised, knowing the house was not worth the loan. People over-bought stock on the market expecting a never-ceasing increase in value. Some fought for raises from companies barely surviving, as in the aircraft industry, even forcing some companies that paid their salaries into failure. We've lost the steel business for the same reason; short-sighted greed carried out to the point of self-destruction. We lost the automobile business the same way; greedy people make high prices and lazy ones have poor workmanship. Result: business gone elsewhere. So it's not just the CEOs who are at fault.
We can't survive as an economy unless we produce. We are becoming a service-provider country, with few real products of our own. We don't even produce as much of the raw materials as we used to. We send out the money; we ship in the products. People in other countries are benefited, but we are poorer because we can't compete in the open market for goods or services. This creates a steady downward decline with corrupt managers and politicians attempting to profit on the way. I suppose they hope to make it to that villa in Capri before the catastrophe.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
What makes art "art"?
Theories abound in all fields of art. Some are simple and some more complex. We have a variety of criteria, mostly exclusionary; we have no positive defining characteristics. Even the intent of the artist has little to do with whether his/her output is perceived as "artistic"; many works of art now widely considered to be masterpieces were simply commercial ventures, things created to please the purchaser. From "Mona Lisa" to Mozart, the intent of the artist was simply to earn a living. Battles have raged among differing groups, yet no group has found a standard that cannot be contravened.
It has occurred to me after thinking about this topic most of my adult life that the failure in the attempted definitions of art arises from thinking of art as a property belonging to the artistic creation. All definitions of which I am aware focus attention on the work of art itself, attempting to ascribe its value as an artistic work to the shape, form, color, sound or skill involved.
I propose that the definition of art be focused instead on the relationship between perceiver and creation. When the creation has the power to evoke strong feeling in the perceiver, even negative feeling, the artistic creation has done something of importance. Unfortunately, such a standard is transitory; things that were highly evocative at one time may lose their power to stimulate response. What moves us and touches us varies from century to century, place to place, person to person. Many if not most people in the world are totally oblivous to the possibility of being emotionally moved by a series of sounds or shapes on paper or the written word.
And some insist that only certain feelings may be evoked. However, this is a weak argument and many instances can be found to be exceptions. Do we consider being moved to anger or disgust to be an artistic experience? How about impatience or contempt or amusement? Another problem with this definition is that it is very culturally specific. A Frenchman may be moved to tears by the sounds of the "Marseillaise", while a Chinese may not even find the sounds particularly interesting. People of all cultures tend to favor certain emotional states over others: sadness, longing, loneliness, love, tenderness, excitement and the like are universal favorites. Other feelings may not even have names, yet their effect is real and understandable. Some art is majestic, overwhelming, even glorious or tragic, but what do we call the feeling that rises up in us when we encounter it?
Still, we should consider that we bring ourselves, our personalities and unique histories, to the artistic creation, with all our prejudices and biases, and in spite of that, we find some creations to have the power to move us quite irrespective of where or when we live in relationship to it. I think an interactive definition is as close as we can come.
It has occurred to me after thinking about this topic most of my adult life that the failure in the attempted definitions of art arises from thinking of art as a property belonging to the artistic creation. All definitions of which I am aware focus attention on the work of art itself, attempting to ascribe its value as an artistic work to the shape, form, color, sound or skill involved.
I propose that the definition of art be focused instead on the relationship between perceiver and creation. When the creation has the power to evoke strong feeling in the perceiver, even negative feeling, the artistic creation has done something of importance. Unfortunately, such a standard is transitory; things that were highly evocative at one time may lose their power to stimulate response. What moves us and touches us varies from century to century, place to place, person to person. Many if not most people in the world are totally oblivous to the possibility of being emotionally moved by a series of sounds or shapes on paper or the written word.
And some insist that only certain feelings may be evoked. However, this is a weak argument and many instances can be found to be exceptions. Do we consider being moved to anger or disgust to be an artistic experience? How about impatience or contempt or amusement? Another problem with this definition is that it is very culturally specific. A Frenchman may be moved to tears by the sounds of the "Marseillaise", while a Chinese may not even find the sounds particularly interesting. People of all cultures tend to favor certain emotional states over others: sadness, longing, loneliness, love, tenderness, excitement and the like are universal favorites. Other feelings may not even have names, yet their effect is real and understandable. Some art is majestic, overwhelming, even glorious or tragic, but what do we call the feeling that rises up in us when we encounter it?
Still, we should consider that we bring ourselves, our personalities and unique histories, to the artistic creation, with all our prejudices and biases, and in spite of that, we find some creations to have the power to move us quite irrespective of where or when we live in relationship to it. I think an interactive definition is as close as we can come.
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