049 - F is for ...artist

049 - F is for ...artist, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I wouldn't normally show the images I take with my camera that I use to create the final image, it is rather like asking to see the contents of my laundry basket. Or, if you buy a painting, you are probably not that interested in first been shown the blank canvas before the artist applies any paint.

However, in my quest to try and demonstrate what I believe is the difference between art and craft, between skill with tools and the idea behind what one attempts to create with those tools, I need some examples.

If you built a house, you are unlikely to tell everyone that you used a Thompson No. 2 hammer, or that you believe a house built with the cheaper Samson Powerforce hammer would be in any way inferior. What is important is the house, its quality. A good craftsman would know the limitations of the Samson, and work round them.

I used Gimp to edit the image because I understand the limitations of my camera and the wall I use as a studio, but mostly because I am not interested in photography but the images themselves. At that point it really doesn't matter what tools I use, as long as I am comfortable with them.

023 the art - craft divide

023 the art - craft divide, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There is always more way than one of achieving anything, and part of what I want to do is to show the very different ways that people believe we can or should live our lives. The reality is that, as a human, you have choices, you decide which is the most appropriate way of doing the things that you want to do.

The problem is that a large proportion of the kind of people who get to make the decisions and apply social pressure are the craft-type people, and so we have education and work environments that are alien to the basic precepts of another large chunk of the population.

I have seen people in different Flikr groups endlessly going on about how important craft is, rejecting or restricting therefore their own ability to create art - and thereby conditioning other people to fail as well. You haven't got the right camera? You are not a Photoshop expert? You want to take pictures of yourself, your family or your pets?

The list is endless, but I am fighting back, taking the battle to where it needs to go - right in the face of the craft controllers.

After all, the world really is a beautiful place, and our lives are limited. Let's find ways we can explore it.

Anyway, when i posted this on flikr I had quite a few insulting posts from someone who seemed to see that I had demonstrated what he was doing as being craft, and not art. When I checked out his photostream the images were well produced but lacking in anything that could be said to be original. He even deleted the comment I left on one of his images - so not only could he not deal with my concept, he could not deal with a slightly negative comment on his images. Such is life.

021-Self Portrait Quality

021-Self Portrait Quality, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

When you see the pictures people take that other people like, often they react to the youthfulness, and the 'norms' of Body Mass Index and Beauty. What is easier for the shapely 20 year old to take a shot of their legs and think they have created Art? Try doing the same when you are 50 or if you are considered medically overleaf!


BTW: this is not a graph in the traditional sense, this is an expression of my Art. As a result I am not going to give you a full explanation, that is not the purpose of Art.

The further away from the 20 norm you are, the harder it is to find an appreciative audience, and you have to put more in to your Art to achieve anything like the same level of acceptance. That's good - if you can do that then you are a lot further down the road of Art than the 20-norms.

If you are a 20, then, sorry, but you are going to have to try a helluva lot harder than flashing your cleavage or wardrobe to impress me.

The New Idea Generation

I think my life is too busy, because I keep having all these good ideas and then later someone else beats me to market because I am so busy having new ideas. Do I simply lack the time to deal with the old ones or am I not making the most effective use of my time. I believe that success in a new market niche is not so much about quality but getting there first. I can also see that there is a wide gap between the people who generate ideas and people who need new ideas, often people from both groups not understanding the depth of their potential or their need. Human society seems to be very fragmentary, since nations, companies and social groups build barriers to block loss of their ideas to the competition, and yet by the same process block soultions to their problems from outside.

Imagine you have a small company and you need some good ideas to really make your business stand out. You cannot afford to employ someone to generate ideas, and anyway what is the chance that you could trust them anyway since whoever you employ is unlikely to understand your needs or your business field. Part of the problem, and a significant part at that, is what I call 'classicalism', the philosophy of giving things names, breaking them down into smaller parts like a child pulling the petals off a daisy and then giving those parts names. Eventually, people come to believe that these named categories, and their names, are more important than the material they attempt to describe. An example is the catergorising of fields of study: "Let's call this area of study 'physics', and let's call this part of physics 'nuclear physics', and lets call this part of nuclear physics 'xxx' etc.". You then create an education system to fit these fields and soon you have specialists who are unable to communicate or, as a consequence, trust specialists from other specialisms. If you spend you life in one specialism it becomes easy to believe that the further away that another specialism is, the less it resembles yours.

We can observe the problems with classicalism in the alienation of science from art, for example, an alienation that is totally dependent on the catergorising of some things as art and others as science.