Faking It
FAKING IT, a new exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum, attempts to show the full range of photographic manipulation in the age before Photoshop. It has an interesting premise. Many photographers in the 19th and early 20th century were dis-satisfied with just showing what the world looked like. They were artists, after all, and wanted to depict their inner world instead. Taking a picture of a pretty landscape was a subject for amateurs and commercial photographers, not artists.
The museum asks in their promotional literature "How could the camera's eye be pried away from external appearances and made to represent the invisible inner world of thoughts, dreams, fears, fantasies, and desires?" Nothing particularly odd about that. Why, though, do critics of painting and sculpture fail to see in their chosen media what lovers of photography take for granted? The only reason I can think of, not a particularly good one, is that most art in earlier centuries was commissioned, unlike early photographs. Art critics then assume that painters and sculptors like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, were so obedient that, like little schoolboys, they did what they were told.
Posted 06 Dec 2012: Artist as PoetExhibitionsInner TraditionMuseumsTheoryVisual Perception
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