Digital BW, The Print

We have a very large traveling show on post-modernism art at 
our local arts center here in Nashville. It's the Paine Webber 
show. Much of it is photography, and the key seems to be -- big 
is good. There are several of the Andreas Gursky prints in there 
-- C-Prints, that will surely fade in short order. Here's a link to the 
"99 cent store" image:

http://www.moma.org/gursky/

Most of the prints are measured in feet, rather that inches. My 
friend Wolf commented on one BW image from another 
photographer: "If that frame was on your contact sheet, you'd say 
to yourself, 'That's an OK image. But it'll probably end up as an 
outtake'". I agree wholeheartedly. But at six by nine feet, I guess 
it's better. 

The Crewdson photograph of the neighborhood car wreck was 
strong though, and since it was shot on 8x10 it held up nicely to 
the large blowup.

What really bugs me are those multi-paragraph "captions" that 
somebody else writes, that sit next to each image, that give 
"context" to the image. Who says these are needed? It's like 
when they play dramatic music at a key point in a movie; making 
you, forcing you, telling you how you should feel at that time. And 
there must be some minimum word-count for these captions, 
because they drone on and on, with multi-syllabic horseshit 
sentences.

We were advised by the security guard to stay at least "14 inches 
away" from these C-Prints. Why? Would the oil in our fingers 
leap out onto the print at 13 inches? Does spittle only travel 13 
inches?

I don't know -- this art world stuff is nuts. I think unless you live in 
Cambridge or within a 100 mile radius of NYC, it must be 
hopeless. It's almost like cell-phone range: once you get outside 
of that 100 mile NY radius, the art world language gets staticky 
and broken-up, and too hard to understand.

Mark Tucker, feeling like Andy Rooney