Digital BW, The Print

At 11:36 pm -0700 11/6/03, Tim Atherton wrote:

>Thought people might enjoy a little bit of the still ongoing 
>exchange on Carbon pigment inkjet prints vs. traditional carbon 
>prints from the LF list:

%< snip >%

>>Hmmm, it DOES appear that the Giclee was around earlier than 
>>'carbon printing'...


On a related note about printing nomenclature: Would anyone _really_ 
want their wife to handle "Giclee" prints made by anyone but 
themselves?

  ;>)

Seriously: "Giclee" has got to be the most ridiculous and unfortunate 
term ever foisted on an artistic community.

Whoever came up with the term "Giclee" to describe ink jet prints may 
have had an English-French dictionary, but they didn't have a very 
good grasp of colloquial French.

Any French speaker who walks into an American gallery and sees prints 
marked "Giclee" probably has to run out of the shop, either because 
they can't stifle their laughter or, for the more squeamish, because 
they can't stifle their disgust.

As for Americans who know, the almost universal response is to roll 
up their eyes and wonder why someone so clueless is charging such an 
outrageous price for an ink jet print instead of explaining why 
_their_ particular ink jet is worth that much over cost when, once 
they have the process pegged, they can knock them off by the hour, 
unattended, on the machine in the back room.


Don't get me wrong: I have great respect for artists who spend hours 
and days fine-tuning their output and producing incredible prints.


I have real problems with shops that produce 7 x 9's by the dozen, 
slap the term "Giclee" on them, display them one-up in the shop bins 
and then try to scam the clueless tourists into buying them as some 
kind of "special one-of-a-kind reproduction" at $120+ a pop.

Not only is the term "Giclee" hilariously offensive, but it impedes 
an open discussion between the artistic community and the customer 
about the quality, uniqueness and desirability of the product. The 
lack of such a discussion may well come back to haunt artists when 
mechanical reproduction of fine prints becomes the norm and consumers 
realize that they have been fooled in the past.


-=-Dennis