I'm never quite sure just who is participating in "art's general discourse" (other than I know it's not me) -- but assuming that partipants include the directors of those institutions with the largest budgets, my local art museum, the Art Institute, must be one of them -- and for them photography is the ONLY process by which the generation born after 1950 may present recognizable images of the world. Large scale photography has completely replaced landscape and figure painting, so if there any notable new figure painters (Jeremy Lipking, Vincent Desiderio, Bo Bartlett) they are not going to be shown as a hot new photographer would be.
Why has this happened ? I guess Saul has offered as good an explanation as any -- but he has neglected to mention one important quality that the western artistic tradition shares with many others in Asia, Africa, and Pre-Columbian America: the making of forms that are drawn. Saul does mention the "hand made" -- but that's only part of the story, since hands can also copy photographs. What's really important is the drawing -- not as in merely making lines --but as in pulling (rather than mechanically or chemically generating) a form into shape (whether it is recognizable as some thing or not). There are special qualities about drawing -- and they are not necessarily apparent to people unless they choose to pay attention to them. The part of recent art history that Saul is neglecting is the marginalization of drawing - where the proliferation of mechanical images is so ubiquitous, an intelligent, well educated viewer, like Geoff, for example, may not even be able to distinguish between an image that is drawn (a Wyeth painting) from one that is not (any photograph) The same thing, presumably, with the well-educated curators of my local museum. They simply cannot see the special qualities of a good figure painting and quite possibly, like William regarding "stupid color" , they acknowledge no such thing. And so they show new photography, instead of new figure painting. (although, interestingly enough, when showing historical photography, a current exhibit shows Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz side by side with drawings by their contemporaries in Paris: Picasso, Mattisse, and Lhote. Good thing Picasso was born over a hundred years ago -- or actually -- a good thing for me -- because if he were born after 1950, artworld climber that he was, he would probably be a photographer. ____________________________________________________________ Free Workers Compensation Legal Information. Click Here. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/PnY6rc2zeQxred7xlvjifcJ3CIpgSG VS5Lai8QlheH1VuliRPIPXG/
