Conscientious Redux

When i first was initiated into photography, early 90’s let’s say, during the last legs of the darkoom, though nobody quite understood that yet, the talk [and i was brought up in a real west coast mystical tradition rather than an east coast street style] the talk was all about learning to really see and by extension, through one’s photographs, teaching other people how to see. you know, people don’t really see; a photographer is a seer. these days though the prevailing dogma is that the photographer is like a curator; a photographer shows people what’s worth seeing rather than learning to see for themselves.

We still need this platform for longer forms of self expression, and a place that people can have their own domain on the web, that really belongs to them, that they have complete control of it, all the way down to the software, the actual code executing on the server someplace in the cloud. You should be able to control every single line of that. And that’s the beauty of open source.

the art market had become the art world. It had begun to dictate the fashions of what is good and what is hot, and to promote the idea that there wasn’t any difference between the two. And that change in the way art is valued felt so arbitrary— and yet final. Critics and curators might rail against the system, and artists might continue to make important new art, but the significance of art was now going to be measured by its performance in the market, and any artists who didn’t believe that were deluding themselves. More and more you saw artists— some cynically, some without even realizing it— conform to the insidious dictates of what sells. You began to see more and more art being made that was clever, obsessively well crafted, often a genuine spectacle, and completely devoid of emotional content.