Ricardo Bevilaqua's photostream  

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
-Oscar Wilde

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

Is art quality relevant?
Why a popularity ranking is unpredictable?

We want to believe that our delight in a fine painting/photography or bottle of wine is due entirely to its quality. But that’s not the way reality works.

The scientists argue that price shift the preferences of the wine tasters, so that the $90 Cabernet seems to taste better than the $35 Cabernet, even though they were actually the same wine.

Subjects consistently report that the more expensive or famous paintings and photos are better, even though they were actually the same art. It is a perennial truth of the art business that high values or fame tend to attract critical endorsement.

The attractiveness of a photo increases with the number of people liking it. Popularity is like a snowball. The popularity itself play as large a role in determining the popularity rank of a photo as its technical skills qualities. A popularity ranking is unpredictable in practice due to their extreme sensitivity to initial conditions of exposition. Why a photo is popular may not have any answer. What we call talent usually comes from success, rather than its opposite.

But stools by artist Ai Weiwei, for half a million dollars? Why is art so damned expensive?

Art buyer pleasure these days is to be found in having their lovely friends being awestruck, in the important business of being seen as cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich. You pay a premium for a piece once owned by someone famous.Something that has been shown in a museum is worth extra.

The people who are spending record amounts on art buy more than the pleasure of contemplating pictures, which they could get for $20 at any museum. They’ve purchased boasting rights.
www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/dec/02/charles-saatc...
www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/04/why-is-art-so-d...
www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/how-does-the-brain-per...
moreintelligentlife.com/content/arts/a-one-man-market?pag...
www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

What is relevant in contemporary photography?

Photography is just many things. But there are amateurs and pretense highbrow critics policing the boundaries of what art, photography and reality are. The photography has expanded in such a way that it’s really hard to define what it really is. So no matter what you say about photography, it is, by necessity, limited to a fraction of it.

The more amateurish thinking you have, the higher you aim your ambition to find an anchor in an old practice or imitate Ansel Adams, in a kind of congealing of art photography around your set of values of the correct image. But what about Diane Arbus or Walker Evans incapacity to print decently? Why believe that photos must have an impeachable veridical relationship to their subject matter, ever? A lot of the great Robert Capa or Brassaï pictures, for example, are staged pictures.The difference between a descriptive photographer robot and art photography is an obvious authorship marker.

In Henri Matisse time, his bold colors and distorted forms were outrageous. A century later, what was once shocking is now considered beautiful art. There are no rules of art that explain the evolution of art in history. Why would anyone think that their taste can predict what is necessary to make a work beautiful or meaningful?

One of the great powers of the internet community is its ability to criticize the idea of the objective opinion, to shame the unquestioning critics' insistence that this or that is a work that everyone must like or dislike. Who see themselves as custodians of high art frequently stumble in recognising significantly innovative or original work
- From a SFMOMA symposium.

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

If clichés are so bad, why do they win popularity contests of photo sites?

"When we see images that are similar to the images that we think are great, there’s an association, a connection that is positive. These are derivative images. But instead of being a negative aspect, these images get elevated, often to the highest awards and often without realizing we’re just awarding what worked in the past."
www.michaelddavis.com/blog/2011/12/6/if-cliches-are-so-ba...

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

"The falsification of photography didn't start with Photoshop, it started with photography. You could look at a photograph and form your own interpretation of it.
Are we that much smarter now? Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations as Secretary of State and showed photographs of plants in Iraq that he claimed produced chemical or biological weaponry. On that basis we went to war."
- Errol Morris on Photography and Reality

Eddie Adams, the AP photographer who snapped the photo of South Vietnamese General Loan executing a defenseless Vietcong prisoner, and earned a Pulitzer Prize for the picture, says: " People believe in photographs, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. Adams discovered that Loan was a beloved hero in Vietnam, to his troops and the citizens and fought for the construction of hospitals in South Vietnam.
-National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg, August 26, 1999.

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

How much are manipulated photographs worth?

The most expensive photograph was sold at Christie’s New York. Andreas Gursky's Rhine II became the first photograph to be sold at auction for over $4 million. It is a manipulated photograph.
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/8883801/The-ten-...
jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archives/how_much_are_photo...
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

"It is rather amusing, this tendency of the wise to regard a print which has been locally manipulated as irrational photography–this tendency which finds an esthetic tone of expression in the word faked. In the very beginning, when the operator controls and regulates this time exposure, when in the dark-room the developer is mixed for detail, breadth, flatness, or contrast, faking has been resorted to. In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible."

Camera Work, No.1, January 1903, by Edward Steichen