Digital BW, The Print

On Feb 5, 2005, at 6:50 AM, 
DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com wrote:

> From: "john dean" <deanwork2003@...>
> Subject: Re: "Fake" Black & White
>
>
> ........... Like photograhy isn't art, its  better. Baudelaire wrote 
> whole essays on how photography
> was "fake" art and should be  shunned by the whole art establishment. 
> Now people want to do the same with digital.
> History repeats itself. They did the same with electronic music in the 
> 80's. We're bored.

�Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before 
external reality; each day the painter becomes
more and more given not to painting what he dreams but what he sees  
Nevertheless it is a happiness to dream, and it
used to be a glory to-express what one dreamt.  But I ask you does the 
painter still know this happiness?�
    Charles Baudelaire, �The Salon of 1859:  The Modern Public and 
Photography,� in The Mirror of Art (New York, 1956, p.233

�Belief in Progress, is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians.  It is the 
individual relying upon his neighbors to do his work�
    Charles Baudelaire,  Intimate Journals,  trans.  Christopher 
Isherwood (Boston, 1957

Baudelaire rightly and prophetically defined the subjective domain of 
dreams as the valid domain for the visual artist; he
also displayed a certain right-hemisphere paranoia, a fear that the 
powers of imagination and intuitive vision would themselves
be usurped by this automatic method of drawing with light.

But whether or not photography and art are the same thing is beside the 
point, since art resides not in techniques but in a knowing
application of insight.  Falling for the anti-technological line, 
Baudelaire dismissed photography as the refuge for every would-be 
painter
  too lazy or untalented to succeed as a real artist - an assessment 
that was no doubt as true then as it is today, when it is even easier
to become infatuated with the gadgetry of media.  But whether they are 
called tools or media, these technical
  extensions of man�s being can only mirror the intent of the user.

William


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