Originally posted by Digitalis When the standards of taste gets lowered, we all pay the price. Ansel Adams and the rest of the f64 group will be turning in their graves, they spent their lives trying pulling photography out of this pictorialist hell hole only for contemporary photographers to crawl back into it.
Artistic culture is user based these days. Everyone is an artist, good or bad, and it makes no difference to the ignorant as long as they see what they expect. Technology has made the means of production available to almost everybody but without the usual education that went with attaining it in the past. Because high standards of achievement are no longer put up for mass consumption by "enlightened" curators there is a morass of material at ground level that is almost impossible to sift through to find the truly good stuff.
This is what has happened in music via iTunes and home studios, and, as a result, a decent muso has almost no chance of selling a record these days - the ones that do tend to be backed to the rafters by multinational corporations hell bent on maintaining their market share. There are millions of people vying for the same market segment.
When you don't need to earn, or validate, your right to exist in competition with others you learn absolutely nothing. Having spent 4 years in an art school I can still recall what a huge effort it took to overcome my prejudices and how difficult it was to move beyond them.
Last edited by bossa; 08-26-2014 at 01:12 AM.