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Comment by Lio | Hacker News Reader

I'm giving you an up vote as I think your opinion deserves to be heard...

However, I think you are wrong and haven't justified your point.

When I look at the work of someone like Gregory Crewdson[1] who has an idea, builds a set, lights a set, posses models and then processes multiple negatives into a final finished image, I see something.

I think it's art because it's a deliberate, complex thing. I see no purpose in it other than to be pleasing. I don't know where his vison comes from but it's much copied but, to my mind, so far not equalled.

Which is a long way round to saying, I like it. :P

If David Lynch films are art then Gergory Crewdson photographs are the same kind of art.

1. He actually uses a whole team to make his images but I'll just talk about him to save on confusion.

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I agree in general that an open forum of ideas should be encouraged, but I have to make an exception for low-effort posts. They waste everyone's time.

(Not really a critique of your post but the one it responds to.)

It isn’t really much of a discussion if low effort contrarianness doesn’t have a chance to surface thoughtful disagreements which otherwise get buried in more combative threads. The comment itself might not have taken much effort, but it can easily spawn a more interesting discussion by being so bare of nuance.

I like the way you think, and I do believe my original comment has spawned decent discussion

Good! Now the less quick trick is finding a way to affect discussion not just prompt it. It’s very similar but requires a lot more anticipation of other people’s emotional state.

I’m upvoting you because…

> I'm giving you an up vote as I think your opinion deserves to be heard...

> However, I think you are wrong and haven't justified your point.

I think this deserves to be highlighted. I sometimes do this too, when I think an idea I disagree with is unfairly being pushed out of the discussion.

(I agree with your position, but I think I would have read it and scrolled past without voting otherwise.)

Sure great points. But in my view, it remains just that, a photograph. A photograph can be deliberate, complex, and evoke many emotions. It can be pleasing, utterly horrific, or anything in between.

But when I take art classes, I'm not taking photos. I do that in photography class. So as a matter of definition, a photo for me qualifies not as art.

So because you don't take photos in your "art" "class", photos aren't art.

Fuck. Can't argue with that.

Yeah, I mean, that pretty much sums it up. Of course, you're free to think differently. I think that's pretty fair. You don't tell me what's art, and neither I, you.

I mentioned Marcel Duchamp's Fountain in another post, slightly tongue in cheek as the previous commenter mentioned bathroom designs.

It’s actually, very, very relevant though.

I see it as the point where Modern Art and discussions of “what is art?” really start.

All that really matters is what an artist intends to be art.

That leads to, well who is an artist then?

Answer: anyone who says they are and who we all agree is one.

i.e. it’s an unsolvable riddle which will always be fun to debate amongst friends.

Right, you touch on basically the same points as I: https://w0nder.herokuapp.com/posts/9fjM1tOJO7MWX4fYw3AU2Q==/...

Does your art class perhaps only cover “fine art”? Or does it also include the performing arts like music, theatre, even cinema? In my experience in the UK, “art” in school commonly only means fine art, and other forms of art are different enough that they’re broken out into other “subjects”.

Yeah I think that's pretty fair. Music, theatre, cinema are performing arts. Not art. You qualify it with "performing".

And that's my point really. It's a distinction based on definition. Collectively, institutions recognize this and inherently add qualifiers to distinguish between these varying disciplines.

So am I right in understanding you aren’t saying photography isn’t “an art”; just that it isn’t “fine art”? In which case I think you’d see much less disagreement here.

I'd probably drop the fine and call what you call fine art, art. But functionally, would likely agree with the distinctions you make between them.

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