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IC w6 Reading and all

  • HildeMaassen
  • Mar 8, 2020
  • 5 min read

Updated: Aug 15, 2020



‘Everything has been done before’.

You here that often

Len: "Does it refer to technique, methodology or entirety photography or art?"
June Szueber: "People who are afraid of being copied are worrying about nothing. There is no such thing as an original idea".

Every photo is equally important, depending on what the viewer makes of it. "It is in the eye of the beholder".


As Len does, I often ask myself why take the trouble to make new visuals when everything is already done? Does what I do matter since it is supposed not to be unique?


Pablo Picasso “good artists copy, great artists steal”.
Michelangelo: "Only God creates. The rest of us just copy".
Paul Gaugain: "Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature, the second is copying the first, the third is copying the second... You see the sequence".
Norman Ridenour: "Copying is not art, it is technique. Art is perception".

I personal don’t believe everything has been done. Not in the same way. I ones was very disappointed seeing a Leonardo Da Vinci expo to learn that all his inventions were a combination or build on other's inventions. They were build from reference but on the other hand nobody is without a history, thus reference.


During the last module I wrote about Denis Dutton who stated that to be able to recognise beauty is in our DNA. https://maassen3.wixsite.com/blog/post/sp-w7-beauty-is-in-your-dna


My son is doing a BA on games art and design where he has to design everything based on reference. Now I understand that if you create a realistic looking 3D world but I sometimes wonder if it doesn't push you in a direction that so many people already walked before and after you and will do in the future.


Herbert Siebner: "Why should I care about style? When I start painting, I never know what will come out. I start as innocent as a child".

Something I recognise; love to just work and see where it brings me.

Susan Sontag: Style is everything

Is it not much more interesting to follow the brain twists that arise during your own process? And yes it may be that you are making something that has been around for a long time, but the road to it may be different.


The painter Piet Mondriaan started with true-to-nature painting to end up in abstraction. The same goes for Pablo Picasso. The path they took ensures that even his abstract works have depth. `The people who started abstraction after him without taking that path have not reached that depth in my perception.

Jan Zawadzki: "As Picasso did away with background so the stylist does away with detail. This liberalizes abstraction as an appropriation of form... "

Images: Piet Mondriaan:

Left: De Oostzijdse Molen bij ondergaande zon aan het Gein - ca 1907

right: Victory Boogie Woogie - 1944.


Images: Pablo Picasso

Left: Science and Charity - 1897

Right: Seated woman in the Garden -1938


On the one hand, I understand that you can learn through copying, especially when it comes to technology. What strikes me, however, is that so often superficial copies are made, but people still think they are original. Then they call it a trend get away with it. Especially in fashion photography and advertisments.


That is how it works as if human has one brain that is building on the science of the generation before (I hope it is not to vague) but great inventions are done on multiple places at the same time and when animals learn to do something at one place in the world they can all do it around the world in no time. A kind of collective vibe.


Does it matter’? asks Len and asks "too who?’

We all remember Darwin but only because he published first.


Does banal mean rubbish? asks Len


No I don’t think it does but it seems to be so in the presented images. The excuse for making images without any form of design; “ I make images of the everyday normal scene which no one ever notice and therefor it becomes special” that is the concept: sorry I don’t have anything with collecting “stamps” through photography.


I see the idee, understand it but the images let me cold. They are snapshots and not worth looking at without knowing the story in my opinion


I saw a talk with Jan Dibbets who said: I am a visual artist. That means that I show what I think, see, research through images. I am not a writer who does the same with words’


Am I getting old, to think this way (and does it matter?)

Len: In the end....NO. At the moment. YES


Why live at the moment, it is gone in a sec. to become history.

Len: Because the alternative is worse? One leg in the past one leg in the future .....piss on the present.

A get that. It is sad but not always to avoid and something people from the south of the Netherlands (my origin) are very good at (In the DNA or from upbringing?)

Nurture versus nature; what will win?


Robb Depenport: "It would seem that copying photographs is never considered plagiarism... Shouldn't real artists get past the point of copying the finished work of fine art photographers?"

Many artists have their opinion about copying other people's work.

Pablo Picasso; Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility. (Pablo Picasso)

References

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© 2019 by Hilde Maassen 

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