Renata Brazilia wrote:
EDIT: sorry didnt see the post in time. cheers

That's okay. I just made it official.

K. Holden wrote:
Hi Mycol!

Jesus, I really need to go to bed. What is everyone doing up at this hour? And if you're in the U.S., we had that ridiculous daylight savings thing so it's even later than it really is.

Sidenote: the daylight savings congress debacle is the second dumbest thing congress has done in the past six years. They moved up the clock change two weeks, thinking it would save energy because you know, people wouldn't turn on their lights until later in the evening. Okay, duh: it makes the morning darker by an hour too, so more people turn on lights before sunrise. It's a wash, idiots. Nice try, though.

Okay, I'm off to sleepyhaus. Ciao!

at least you're in SF... it's 3:50am here

LiliOPhoto wrote:

You can edit it, but I know what you said.

Primal Lens wrote:
This thread is making me want to hunt down some of the grainy severely motion blurred images I have from some of my past shoots. I like them but never thought others might.

There was some work, I believe it was by Thomas Ruff, he took like these shots he found online, all hardcore porn, and then blurs them to the point if irrecognition.

Aaron S wrote:

There was some work, I believe it was by Thomas Ruff, he took like these shots he found online, all hardcore porn, and then blurs them to the point if irrecognition.

And made a book of it if I am not mistaken? I actually recognized a couple of the porn stars through the blur.

Primal Lens wrote:

And made a book of it if I am not mistaken? I actually recognized a couple of the porn stars through the blur.

Yes, I do believe it has a book. It's almost creepy seeing his later work after that.

Aaron S wrote:

Yes, I do believe it has a book. It's almost creepy seeing his later work after that.

I haven`t seen his older work but I got a laugh from his blurred porn book as I went through and was like hey, Christy Canyon,and hey thats so and so,lol.

Primal Lens wrote:

I haven`t seen his older work but I got a laugh from his blurred porn book as I went through and was like hey, Christy Canyon,and hey thats so and so,lol.

Well, I guess it's not really newer, but it's his portraits.

Aaron S wrote:

Well, I guess it's not really newer, but it's his portraits.

Is it actually his work though? Or portraits he found and edited,lol.

Primal Lens wrote:

Is it actually his work though? Or portraits he found and edited,lol.

They're actually his portraits.

Aaron S wrote:

They're actually his portraits.

I seem to not be pulling any of his portrait stuff up on Google. Or maybe I am but not seeing it as creepy, basically just people staring at the camera.

Primal Lens wrote:

I seem to not be pulling any of his portrait stuff up on Google. Or maybe I am but not seeing it as creepy, basically just people staring at the camera.

It's just that his stuff goes from the two extremes. From porn to strictly Becher-esque.

Aaron S wrote:

It's just that his stuff goes from the two extremes. From porn to strictly Becher-esque.

Ohhhh,ok.Now I see whatcha mean.

Mycol Chauncey wrote:
I'M NOT SURE IF HE HAS A MODEL MAYHEM PAGE, BUT WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT PATRICK HOELCK?


MC.

That's a big wow, for me. If y'all think Ms. Leibovitz has cornered the market on photographs of celebrities, there's a new sheriff in town.

Recommended:

http://www.patrickhoelck.com

Laura Tillinghast Photo wrote:
I'm sad that I didn't make this list. And my art degree is cowering in it's box under the bed.

I never make the list.  :-(

K. Holden wrote:
There's no accounting for taste.

Good morning!

Paramour Productions wrote:
Yours or his?

Exactly.

Paramour Productions wrote:
By bringing film into the equation you raise a whole host of issues, which, quite frankly, would take days of writing to go through.  But the first and most obvious is what is art, what is entertainment and where do the meet.  Ancillary to that is where do all the pretentious assholes that deem what films are art fit in.  I was taught in school that Bergman's Seventh Seal was the ultimate art film.  That was what a bunch of professors who study syllabuses thought. So of course as a younger person, I learned to rave about it as well and spout all of the bs that I had been taught.  The older I got the more I detested it as a pretentious piece of crap.  You can't believe how delighted I was when I read in Bergman's own writings that he felt the same exact way!  But don't tell that to the inane professors who still teach that shit so they can feel elite within their own little clique.

The reason I think I love film so much is because it does not strive to be art, just as I do not strive to be an artist.  It strives to be well crafted entertainment and yet, sometimes, when the symbiosis between creator and viewer works, it indeed rises to that level.  And to me that is real art.  The art of the every person. It is not simply decreed art by those who cannot do and therefor teach, it is raised aloft by the many who are viscerally compelled to do so.

This in turn leads us, in an abbreviated readers-digest sort of way, to the end of your paper and the beginning of my post - the politicization of art.  The Nazi's tried to do it with film, which is why the most talented directors, most of them Jews, left Germany, much to the delight of film audiences everywhere (Lang was actually offered the job of Director of Propaganda, but turned it down and left the country for obvious reasons). 

I have had the good fortune to work with many artists from Russia and Ukraine who were forced to work under communism.  I had the opportunity not only to study Krychevsky's work, but to stay with his family and here his story as I will be producing a documentary on his life.

For those who don’t know, Krychevsky, was the Father of the Ukrainian National Movement in Architecture.  He was a gifted architect, artist, scholar and educator.  During the brief three year period of Ukrainian freedom prior to the retaking of Ukraine by the soviets he was part of an intellectual elite that tried to nurture and lead the fledgling democracy which they helped to create.  When the Soviets arrived, many of that cadre were killed, however Krychevsky survived.  Once the communists were in power they, as you said, politicized art. Krychevsky’s brother attempted to continue his art work under the Soviet regime, and for a brief period did what he as told, but ultimately his art did not jive with the communist way of life and he was tortured and executed. Krychevsky rebelled in a much subtler way.  As an architect the communists wanted him to design everything in a very epic Russian style.  Which he did, sort of.  However, he brought together all the elements of Ukrainian peasant art and used that in all of his architecture, creating for the first time a Ukrainian national style.  This had tremendous impact.  Remember prior to their freedom a few years prior, Ukraine had never  been a sovereign nation, simply a region continuously ruled from outside.  For the first time someone was saying “this is what it means to be Ukrainian”.  The soviets didn’t protest to much as his work was well hidden, but even that that they did notice the didn’t pay much attention to at first because it wasn’t deemed worthy, or even deemed “art”, by the Russian “critics”…  Eventually of course his work gathered momentum and he escaped the country, first traveling through Europe before emigrating to Venezuela.  It was the art of the proletariat, not the Soviet government, which ultimately held power.

If you study the orange revolution you will see that again it was mostly the artists who brought it about.  Many of them I know and greatly admire.  Some of it is very high-brow, some of it is quite pedestrian, but it is all powerful.

What I find most amusing, is when I sit with these artists and read with them the academic writings of ivory-tower entrenched critics analyzing their work.  At first I read these writing very intently, after all if was to be working with them, I wanted to understand their work.  The all laughed at me and told me that all of these writings were shit.  “But you don’t say that at the gallery events” I said.  No of course not, we need their recognition so that we can make a name and sell our work, but they are idiots who think to much and attribute meaning that is not there because they can do nothing of creative value themselves.

For the most part, I’ve come to agree with them.

Thinking...

DolceV wrote:

One of my favorite photographers on MM. And possibly one of the more unappreciated ones.

dude!  thank you!  and right back at you....

K. Holden wrote:
Thinking...

Me too and I already must concede that the "everyman" comment is horseshit.  After all, the everyman does not appreciate John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Shoenberg or Gustav Kimpt or, or, or....  Yet, there is some truth in it, especially when dealing with "art" that is also "entertainment".  His contemporary critics, for example, thought much of Mozart's work was, to use the current vernacular, too "pop".   Shakespeare was the Quentin Tarantino of his day. 

So there is a fine line to be drawn, surely there will be great art that eludes the masses, this has always been the case.  However, there is also a school of thought, in this country at least, which dictates that if something does have mass appeal, it can't possibly be good art, that the two are, by their very nature, mutually exclusive.  While I do not find many artists who share this view, I have known many art critics who have.

Marko Cecic-Karuzic wrote:
I've just gone through this whole thread. Twice.

Lovely, lovely stuff here. Much of it's quite beautiful, and some of it's really excellent. And yet there's the foul stench of rotting flesh that just can't be escaped. Such is the state of affairs in the world of fine art. In a world where the curator and the critic have been calling the shots for how knows how long, what else could we expect except the most narrowly-defined, manneristic, FEEBLE world that exists in all of photography. Curators and critics are the curse of the genre, and they need to be gotten rid of and their influence expunged. Post haste.

This ain't rock n' roll. This is genocide.

damn!  you're supposed to be on vacation.  what the hell is going on out there???

Marko Cecic-Karuzic wrote:
I've just gone through this whole thread. Twice.

Lovely, lovely stuff here. Much of it's quite beautiful, and some of it's really excellent. And yet there's the foul stench of rotting flesh that just can't be escaped. Such is the state of affairs in the world of fine art. In a world where the curator and the critic have been calling the shots for how knows how long, what else could we expect except the most narrowly-defined, manneristic, FEEBLE world that exists in all of photography. Curators and critics are the curse of the genre, and they need to be gotten rid of and their influence expunged. Post haste.

This ain't rock n' roll. This is genocide.

I can officially retire from this thread as Marko has, in a far more succinct and elegant fashion than I could, perfectly stated what it was I was trying say.

Thanks, Marko!

Marko Cecic-Karuzic wrote:
Oh I don't know. I think when all is said and done, I love people and I hate institutions. Wherever I go recently, I see the rush to institutionalize everything (and in the most annoying ways possible) I would otherwise kinda like, and it's really spoiling it for me. All of it. When I looked at this thread, and saw so much stuff I liked so much, in a context that made me instinctively want to toss my computer, my cameras, all my mountains of negs and trannys and whatnot out the window and go live in a mountain hut in Montana, I was reminded in a not-so-pleasant way of my instinctive first gut reaction to that awful, awful "Fashioning Fiction" show that theoretically I should've loved so much. (Which also had exquisite work in it, BTW.)

1. We're all "critics" insofar that we have an aesthetic. The institution comes into play when there is the urge for viewers/consumers/critics (the "non-artist") to align their aesthetics, cut out the unique and individual views that (gasp) differ from a mass-ordained acceptance factor.

2. What happens when the critic is also the artist? The institution is thrown on its head, which is fan-fucking-tastic, if you ask me. The best "critics" I know are [also?] artists. We do not create in a vacuum, and then throw out the work: There ya go! See ya! But actively contribute to the community conversation, dialogue, dialectic, etc. One woman is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an institution.

Paramour Productions wrote:

I can officially retire from this thread as Marko has, in a far more succinct and elegant fashion than I could, perfectly stated what it was I was trying say.

Thanks, Marko!

Bullshit. You both should stay. What does Marko know about Ukrainians anyway?

K. Holden wrote:
Bullshit. You both should stay. What does Marko know about Ukrainians anyway?

Chum chum, pa pa!

(I spelled that phonetically, I can't spell in Ukrainian...)

EDIT: But alas, I have to go and shoot a gal for a Maxim thing, so no art tonight.  I'm just trying to come up with ways to hide nipples without a hand-bra!  LMFAO!!!!!

That said, if you PM me your email address, I'll try and send you some things I've shot you may actually like...

Paramour Productions wrote:

Chum chum, pa pa!

(I spelled that phonetically, I can't spell in Ukrainian...)

EDIT: But alas, I have to go and shoot a gal for a Maxim thing, so no art tonight.  I'm just trying to come up with ways to hide nipples without a hand-bra!  LMFAO!!!!!

That said, if you PM me your email address, I'll try and send you some things I've shot you may actually like...

Best of creativity to you, sir, post-haste!

And you bet your ass I want to see those things you will try and send. PM is coming...