Burtynsky / china / 8x10 or 4x5 ? slides or color

[Kirk Gittings]

"Art is a thing of beauty"

Art can be a thing of beauty, even if it is not about beauty. Indead, much of history's great art is not about beauty. For instance Picasso's "Guernica" or Poussin's "The Rape of the Sabine Women".

[tim atherton]

First, Trisha Romance is enough to make Reese Witherspoon cuddling a kitten throw up it's so saccharine.

"I see his type of images at ANY retail art store in any mall or fine art store anywhere" o you frequent art galleries where the photographs run from $10,000 to $50,000 and up? That's where you will find them. Burtinsky's work sells like hot cakes to private collectors.

Dictionary definitions are almost always pretty useless apart from finding the correct way to spell something. (through simple definition from a more mainsstream dictionary would be "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects" the "Heritage Dictionary" has oversimplified for it's readership by substituting beauty for aesthetics. Unfortunately they don't mean the same and two words are not interchangeable and the simplistic result is misleading).

Van C - you are talking much more about decor and art to match your sofa. I not that the greatest selling artist of 2006 was Picasso. Your terribly limited (and limiting) definition of art would exclude certain of his works, along with those of Goya, Grunewald and many others through history.

You a really talking much more about kitsch - which is fine (bateman , fatali etc) than fine art. But don't try and confuse the two.

[tim atherton]

in addition, the best defintion of kitsch comes from Kundera:

Kitsch, he argues, isn't primarily about bad taste or the vulgarities of popular devotional images: kitsch is "the absolute denial of shit". Kitsch is that vision of the world in which nothing unwholesome or indecent is allowed to come into view. It's the aesthetics of wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Kitsch excludes shit in order to paint a picture of perfection, a world of purity and moral decency.

Milan Kundera kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit.” His argument was that kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitised view of the world in which “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.”

In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real life, kitsch, Kundera suggested, is intimately linked with totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally acceptable consensus; by contrast, “everything that infringes on kitsch,” including individualism, doubt, and irony, “must be banished for life” in order for kitsch to survive. Therefore, Kundera wrote, “Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.”

For Kundera, “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Most of the work and defintions you quote bear this out.

Great photogrpahy has always been the antithesis of this - Atget, Evans, Sudek, Friedlander, Eggleston etc

[Paddy Quinn]

Van

Most people do not display things not beautiful in their homes, you do not display ugly furniture or anything else. We don't go hanging garbage cans on our walls or have photos of them, or of our tire disposal sites, mines, etc. Things like these are more documentary, interesting enough to view in the right place like a public gallery. If you want to have in your living room images of industrial sites, that is your business, but that is not the norm. That is not art, it is documentary. Art has no other purpose other then give us joy, something to beautify our surroundings or beautiful to look at.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) just because you say it, it doesn't make it true.

Many many people buy the work of Burtynsky and Gursky and Struth and the Bechers and others (for real or in reproduction) to hang on the walls of their homes and offices. The posters of this kind of work sells like hot cakes at museum shops of the Tate Modern, SFMoMA and so on. You are simply wrong in what you say. Of course if you take view from Walmart art sales you could say so, but art isn't usually judged by the lowest common denominator and highest volume of sales. My favourite dogs playing poker on velvet would be one of the greatest pieces of art in all history if that were the case

[Michael S. Briggs]

You'all need longer memories. We have done the subject of Van Camper's restricted and limited definition of art and his rejection of Burtynsky's work as art before: http://largeformatphotography.info/lfforum/topic/503665.html. We are not going to persuade him.

[John Brownlow]

yeah, well he can take back that crap about what people on their walls though. He'd have a shock if he saw my walls, I can tell you.

[Jim collum]

>You'all need longer memories. We have done the subject of Van Camper's restricted and limited definition of art and his rejection of Burtynsky's work as art before: http://largeformatphotography.info/lfforum/topic/503665.html. We are not going to persuade him.

that's it.. i was having a real strong sense of deja vu on this thread... the other is almost identical

[tim atherton]

What you are talking about in general is more properly called popular commercial art.

He is quote a good discussion of why it's a good thing that it isn't popular opinion that defines something as art. Like all apologies the fit isn't perfect, but it makes the point - here in relation to the the New Scottish Realists.

http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_edwardwinkleman_archive.html

"When you introduce words like "shit", do you really think I respect your opinion?" It is of no concern to me, though your response certainly confirms Kundera's definition of Kitsch - which applies well to the works of Bateman, Romance, Vettriano, Geddes etc.

Finally, I wonder, do you have this on your wall:

http://scholar.uwinnipeg.ca/courses/38/4500.6-001/Cosmology/time-goya-painting.gif

or this

http://www.abcgallery.com/G/goya/goya67.html

http://www.abcgallery.com/G/goya/goya145.html

http://www.wga.hu/art/p/poussin/1/09plague.jpg

http://www.postmodern.com/~fi/morbid/doc/grunewald_st-ant.htm

http://webed.vw.cc.va.us/vwbaile/Media/Raft.jpg

or even this

http://arthistory.heindorffhus.dk/goya-PtgShootings-3-5-1808-large.jpg

and so on - there is so much art that doesn't come anywhere close to your limited definition of "pretty"

Compare any of those to Trisha Romance - and - well - you can't. Her work doesn't even belong the same universe

http://www.artandnature.com/romance.html

http://www.artandnature.com/romance/generousheart.html

http://www.artandnature.com/heartandsoul.html

I'd rather hang up a Gursky anyday

[Jim collum]

well.. i just got a copy of Burtynsky's China.. and it contains some beautiful images, many of which i would gladly have hanging on a wall in my home

[Jim collum]

>When 80% of the population likes something and is buying, that is what counts. People buy what they like. When a bunch of people believe a doctor is doing a great job, when in fact the medical association finds him to be incompetent, that is not the same thing. People are not trained to know the difference, but it does not require training to know if you like an art piece or not

problem is, your list of 'art' is a bit too exclusive for the majority. I'd say there's a very small percentage of U.S that's ever heard of Bateman or Trisha.. .even smaller in the rest of the world.

If popular vote defines 'art', then i'd say that popular art is much closer to your definition.