urban ku # 158 and 159 ~ swirling clouds

Cloud chasing • click to embiggenWriting in his essay, Qualifying Photography as Art, or, Is Photography All It Can Be?, Christopher Bedford stresses the importance of 'authorial concept' and 'authorial intention' (intentionality) in determining the value of a work of Art (photography division).

He lays bare, to those who didn't already know it, that AC and Intentionality are, in fact, the criteria which are the determining factors (for the academic 'lunatic fringe') when he wrote; "The ultimate referent is, therefore, not the form or content of his images, but the authorial concept." Translation = It's the idea behind the picture, not the picture itself, that matters.

Taken to the extreme, which many on the academic lunatic fringe have done, this means that any picture, despite its visual merits or lack thereof, is Art as long as it is accompanied by an intellectually interesting artist statement that speaks to the photographer's concept / intentionally, especially if that statement is theory-laden and contains enough references to art history to enable critics and the academic crowd to parse it from now until the cows come home.

To be fair to Bedford, his essay addresses this very proclivity amongst he and his brethren and he sounds a call to address this imbalance. It is time, he states, for critics, curators, and academia to learn about the - heretofore considered 'mundane and prosaic' - process of making a photograph because there is intentionality a-plenty in the process and that very intentionality "shape(s) the image, direct(s) the viewer’s attention, and contribute(s) to the production of meaning."

Duh.

Good for him and them. Better late than never. But ....

There is a whole other crowd, photographers themselves, that needs to come to grips with the notion that by itself the process of making a picture, with all of its intentionally, does not Art make. Authorial concept matters and some concepts are much better than others.

Consider this from Sir Joshua Reynolds writing for the Royal Academy in London in 1768:

The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it. As this principle is observed or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art, or a mechanical trade. In the hands of one man it makes the highest pretensions, as it is addressed to the noblest faculties: in those of another it is reduced to a mere matter of ornament; and the painter has but the humble province of furnishing our apartments with elegance.

Anyone need to re-address the idea of Fine Art vs. decorative art?