I can safely say - without the slightest bit of exaggeration- that it makes my skin literally crawl when I see things like these:
Steven Meisel, Vogue 1999
John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Charles 1887
Hiroshi Fujimoto
Jan Vermeer
Call it what you wish. Conceptual art, postmodernism, visual wit, homage, whatever… it still can’t hide the deafening sentence:
Are We So Are Bankcrupted of New Visual Ideas That We Can Only Resort to Producing Counter-Counterfeits of reality? Appropriating someone else’s memory and calling it our own?.I know Sujimoto is trying to make a statement regarding images of Mexican-made wax representations of Western history photographed in Asia, and…I also realize there may be an equally deafening note of hypocrisy coming from someone who plays 16th century music on a sampled harpsichord. But I don’t make my living from it and I certainly don’t call it art (or a postmodern commentary on the ironic polyphony of post Monterverdi voicings).Looking back at the days pre-industrial age, painters and illustrators only have land, villages, a church, water, sunlight, and people. Look at the glorious pantheon of art work that came out of the this modest palette.
We, in our dizzying babel of knowledge, structures, theories, interchangable parts, high speed travel and global reaches in addition to the ability to electronically manipulate any image to reveal a multitude of dimensions and interiors…
can merely make a cheap counterfeit of someone else’s reality
…and call it progress.
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on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Leisure.
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