Jeffery Winkler
Art

	For most of human history, photography didn't exist. Therefore the only way to 
convey or record what something looked like was to describe it in words, a two 
dimensional representation, such as a drawing or painting, or a three dimensional 
representation, such as a statue made of clay or stone. The first members of the human 
species made cave paintings and statues. This was art. The purpose of art for millennia 
was to convey what things looked like. You could be portraying something that existed in 
real life or you could be portraying something fictional, such as from mythology. Either 
way, you try to make it as realistic as possible. You try to capture what the person, place, 
or thing looks like as accurately as possible. How similar the art looks like to the thing 
itself was a measure of how talented the artist was. Look at Greek and Roman statues, 
Renaissance art, or 18th Century paintings. The artist tried to make it look as much like 
what it was suppose to be as possible. If it didn't look exactly like the real thing, it's 
because the artist wasn't capable of making it look like the real thing.
	This all changed with photography. After photography was invented, if you 
wanted to convey or record what something looked like, you would just take a picture of 
it. You could capture what someone looked like much more accurately, quickly, simply, 
and easily by just photographing them than by laboriously painting a portrait of them. 
Now you still needed painting and sculpture to portray fictional things that didn't exist. 
However there isn't much of a need for this. Therefore artists found themselves no longer 
in demand. There was nothing for them to do. You might think that these people would 
cease to exist, that they would just fade away. Instead they thought up a revolutionary 
new concept. Up until that point, painters and sculptors had striven to make their work as 
realistic as possible. Any discrepancy between the art and the real life subject was the 
fault of the artist. In the 19th Century, artists thought up the idea of deliberately making 
art not look as much like the subject as they could make it. They chose to make the art 
look less like what it's supposed to be than they could choose to make it. This was a 
radical concept.
	One of the first painters to move away from pure realism was Edouard Manet. We 
would say that his paintings were entirely realistic but people at the time complained that 
his work, such as his nude "Olympia", was "flat" and not as realistic as he could make it. 
After that you had Claude Monet. We would also say that his paintings were realistic but 
they were less realistic than anything previous. They had a blurry fuzzy look. This was 
the Impressionist movement. Then there was Pierre Renoir who did these same sort of 
blurry paintings where the background is just random brushstrokes. A few decades 
earlier, these people would have been considered horrible painters. Their paintings 
lacked crystal clarity. The obvious reason is because photography existed. If you wanted 
crystal clarity, you would just take a photograph. After that, there was Edgard Degas who 
was more unrealistic than anyone previous. Making art less realistic became viewed as 
new and modern, and thus sought after, which meant they had to keep making art less 
realistic in order to continue being new and modern. This trend continued until the 20th 
Century when you had Fauvism led by Henri Matisse, and then Cubism led by Pablo 
Piccasso. Here the paintings became so unrealistic, it became almost satiric. The average 
person would laugh at these paintings. If you take a highly cubist Piccasso painting, the 
average person would either burst out laughing, or scratch their heads and say "I don't get 
it".
	Up to this point, now matter how unrealistic, the artwork was still supposed to 
portray something physical. The painting or sculpture was always suppose to be some 
person, place or object. Eventually, they reached a point where the artwork could 
represent some abstract concept or emotion. You could paint red zigzags and say, "This 
represents anger." Eventually, it progressed beyond that to the point where it wasn't 
supposed to represent anything whatsoever. The artist could make a painting or sculpture, 
and it was literally not intended to represent or convey anything whatsoever. This is like 
Piet Mondrian who did pure abstraction. A perfect example is Christo Javacheff. He just 
tries to think up grand scale very weird things to do and calls it art. You can walk into 
any modern art museum, and see bizarre abstract sculptures. The artist has nothing in his 
or her mind that the art is supposed to represent, convey, or invoke. Often they claim 
otherwise but this is the case. The artist has nothing in mind. This isn't even 
communication. Communication is when there is data transferred from the mind of one 
person to the mind of another person. With modern art, there is nothing being transferred 
from the mind of the artist to the mind of the viewer. Therefore this is not even 
communication.
	For millennia, art was defined as recording what something looked like. In the 
20th Century, art was defined as not recording what something looked like. Photography 
is recording what something looks like. Therefore photography was not considered art. 
This is ironic since photography was more similar to art as it existed for millennia than 
the art of the time. The person who really got people to think of photography as art was 
Ansel Adams. He did this by imitating art in the sense of not making the pictures look 
like reality to the greatest extent that he could. If he wanted to make the pictures capture 
reality as accurately as possible, he would have done them in color. Instead he used black 
and white. In doing so, he deliberately made the pictures look less like reality than he 
could have. In that, he was being similar to artists. Therefore his pictures were 
considered art. Of course there were people before Adams who championed the idea of 
photography was art. The most famous was Peter Emerson who made a distinction 
between photography as art and photography for nonaesthetic purposes. Notice that no 
one ever bothered making such a distinction for traditional artistic media, such as 
between painting as art and painting for nonaesthetic purposes.
	This gets to the question as to what is art. In the past, any painting or sculpture 
was considered art by definition. However, all photography was obviously not art, so you 
had to distinguish between photography for aesthetic purposes as other photography. 
How do you define this? You could use the desires of the photographer as the determiner. 
If the photographer says that it was intended as aesthetic, it's art, and if not, not. What if 
the intention of the photographer is not known? What if the photographer says a picture 
is artistic, and no one else thinks it is? What if a journalist takes a picture without the 
intention of being artistic, and someone else hangs it in a gallery, and everyone else 
thinks it is artistic? Should the wishes of the photographer be the only determining 
factor? Should it be determined by society? In our society, if you took a coat hanger, 
twisted it in a random shape, and held it up, many people would call it art. If someone 
wrote a work of literature, society would determine whether it's considered any good, but 
not whether it's literature at all. I believe that in order to be art, a photograph should do 
more than simply record what something looks like, even though that was the purpose of 
art for millennia. It should somehow say or invoke something beyond that. Of course 
what pictures say or invoke, if anything, is subjective, and thus what is art is subjective.
	I believe that in order to be art, by that I mean art as it exists today and not as it 
had for millennia, a work must have a "message", meaning it must somehow covey or 
invoke some response in the viewer that was intended by the artist. The artist must be 
communicating something to the viewer. With abstract modern art, even if it triggers a 
response, there is nothing being communicated from the artist to the viewer. If a 
photojournalist takes a picture, it's mostly just to record something. Even if there is also 
some message, they are supposed to be as objective as possible, and have as little of 
themselves in the picture as possible. It's like comparing a novelist to a reporter. If you 
take family snapshots yourself, it's almost entirely to simply record something. If it's 
purpose is for the viewer to masturbate, then that does not constitute a "message", and so 
pornography is not art. Some slight sexual arousal is considered a legitimate message for 
art but if it's to great, it becomes to much like pornography.
	If you look at art from Mesopotamia and Egypt, you see how it gradually became 
more realistic over time. If you track Ancient Greek art from to Minoans and 
Mycenaeans through Dark Age and Classical Greece, it gradually became more realistic 
until it achieved life-like realism. Similarly, if you look at the evolution of European art 
from Medieval through Renaissance art, you can watch the art become more realistic as 
they learn about perspective, and learn "how to do it". The conclusion is that they were 
always trying to make it as realistic as possible.
	However, this general trend is contradicted when you look at the art of the most 
primitive societies. If you look at the art of African tribes, Native Americans, Australian 
Aborigines, or South Pacific Islanders, it's obvious that the art is often not as realistic as 
they could make it. Also if you look at the art of Neolithic Europe, such as the famous 
Venus figurines, you can see that they are obviously not trying to capture what it looks 
like in real life. With the Venus statues, which have exaggerated breasts, buttocks, and 
vagina, it's obvious that they were trying to capture some spiritual essence of female 
fertility, as opposed to the real thing itself. Why primitive societies do this is a 
fascinating subject for anthropologists and psychologists. However, more advanced 
societies portraying mythology in art is not an example of this. For instance, there is an 
Etruscan bronze of the Chimera from Greek Mythology. The reason it is such a fine work 
is because it is so realistic. You can almost hear the creature wail as Bellerophon's spear 
pierces it. It looks like a real animal even though the Chimera never existed. To some 
extent, that explanation can account for some seemingly unrealistic primitive art also. For 
instance perhaps elongated African masks are not deliberately unrealistic human faces 
but actually attempts at realistic portrayals of demon faces. Another explanation is often 
images or statues were produced with great frequency, and so they chose quantity over 
quality. In fact written language arose when drawings had to be done so quickly and 
frequently that they became stylized.