SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

Once upon a time for thirteen years I read the New York Times every day, the paper in the know, the paper of record, a paper my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents read… New Yorkers after all.  Post 911 I found their editorial page to be shameful so I do not read it any longer, and I have found that the NYT front page is another editorial, which led me to drop the purchase and support of this paper.  My scanning of the Times is an online affair to check in on what they are selling editorially and to see who they are covering in technology and art.  Technology is always fun as I’m a bit of a Mac wonk and I like David Pogue’s brain, but the NYT arts section has fallen off precipitously and they barely cover fine art any longer.  Their big online story today is PDiddy, which I can see plastered on the front page of the Sunday Arts section.  I can’t stand this guy they’re selling.  Then you can read about some classical music, movie reviews galore, and the very occasional Kimmelman or Roberta Smith fine article.  The last article close was a strange one by Mr. Kimmelman who asks his audience if two Walker Evans photographs stitched together in photoshop and presented as final art products are art.  Mr. Kimmelman is a strong photography as art proponent and I disagree with this perspective, namely as the final product of photography is about multiplicity.  There is no longer some sacred concept of a photographer in a darkroom producing a one of a kind print, therefore to answer Mr. Kimmelman’s question about paintings and photographs there is nothing similar to the two.  Original paintings and sculptures require the artist’s hand, body and eye, which cannot be matched by a photographic print.  Mr. Kimmelman several years ago heralded the Andreas Gursky retrospective before the Moma closed for renovations, reinforcing  to the market in essence the absurd notion that a print ought to sell for 300,000. USD.  Let me be clear now to say that no print, no multiple in any form should ever hold a price tag like this.  The art world has built a market for photography on the false premise that photographic prints are ‘originals’ of sorts and therefore ought to be priced like paintings.  This fallacy only hurts the art market for false advertising.  Photography is an important medium, its primal power in photojournalistic historical record or in many media cases to distort or misinform the public, as with daily newspaper photographs or propoganda campaigns.  The argument that photography is like painting is an annoying one as the differences are deep.  Painting a strong picture is so much more complex than taking a nice photograph my editorial on this subject will last days.  The best photographs are about capturing moments, and this is where photography is strongest, where it exists as a break front, a pillar of civilization, an unshakable collective visual memory that is alarming and disarming in its remarkable power.  But everyone has a camera and I argue simply that just as Warhol talks about everyone having 15 minutes of fame, everyone with a camera will take 15 remarkable photographs in his or her lifetime.  This dilutes the argument that there are really only a handful of top photographers.  We are all photographers like much of the world speaks language in order to communicate.  Last week I spent an hour with William, who I took 350 photographs of from which to paint a single portrait painting.  Which do you think I would prefer in the end hanging on my wall?  A painter takes a blank canvas and creates an image in some genre.  This makes painting something that photography can never approach.  The two are crucial in their own respective ways, but the art market has made a dangerous habit out of selling photographic prints as ‘original art objects’.  Photographs are meant for multiplication as recorded song, the written word and the magic of film.  On that note, the apex of fine art film would be a film like ‘The Godfather’, so the story of fine art film like Bill Viola and Matthew Barney is a short minefield that I’ve always found nonsensical.