Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Blah blah blah

If I read another artist statement that talks about wanting to explore time or place or space, I am going to vomit.

7 comments:

matt said...

s when I say "AMEN" to this. I mean that.

matt said...

Hey, half my comment disappeared.

What I said was "I'm so NOT hating on my fellow photographers when I say "AMEN" to this."

But yea. I couldn't agree more.

Patrick Romero said...

what i especially hate is the phrase that begins "The viewer, when looking at these images, feels etc......". Or "the images suggest blah blah blah...". Please don't spell out for me what i should feel/see/think when i look at your pictures. Did Robert Frank provide artist statements for his work?

Anonymous said...

Equally likely to cause one to vomit is the artist's predilection for "Work that explores that site and non-site bulls#@t" (as my wife refers to it).

J. Wesley Brown said...

Yeash, um, no one did in the history of art until the last century (and really only the last couple of decades. Conceptualism won and curators etc. got dumbed down, and now we have to give them something to work with so they can trash or praise the work after deciding whether they feel the way we told them to feel.

See American Suburb X for a refreshing exception to this rule.

Anonymous said...

I just read one where, apparently the photographer "sympathised" with the objects he was photographing...

J. Wesley Brown said...

As if that were something special? Now, as for the spelling, I'm a grammar snob but one doesn't necessarily need know how to spell to be a good photog.