One of my favorite columnists, Tony Long over at Wired, posted an entry today that took me back to my Contemporary Art classes in college. He insists that the current crop of digital photographers aren't artists, because they don't labor in a darkroom, like the good old days:
In other words, it was hands-on. It required some honest sweat. It required time. When you were finished, and assuming you had done sterling work, you had produced a piece of art...
Whereas in digital photography,
It's like "painting" a picture using your computer. It's kind of fun to do and what you have when you're done may be superficially terrific, but unless you've actually applied brush to canvas you're no artist. You are merely a technician with a good eye.
Personally, I'm amused; this is an argument guaranteed to polarize any group of people, and I accused him of pulling it out of a stack of file cards labelled "Column Topics Guaranteed to Piss People Off."
But it did make me think, nostalgically, about the quality of the tools. Quality not as a measure of value, but as a descriptor. My writing changes--not for better or worse, but simply changes, depending on if I'm typing or writing longhand. There's a difference in time, in the way I place emphasis on things, in the pacing and structure of sentences. There's also a qualitative difference in experience--most of the time, the feeling of my fingers on a keyboard do not give me the same visceral experience that the texture of my moleskine or the soft rubber grip on my pen give me.
Part of that may be the delineation of space and time. It's much easier to delete, to copy and paste, to change your mind using a word processor. If I'm writing something out, there is perhaps more thought given to the content, to the structure, before it is committed indelibly through ink to paper. Likewise, I know for a fact that when I was producing slides for a theatrical production, each one having to be processed at a lab, the care and thought put into just what images to put up, how long, and the transitions between was much greater than when I put together my last slideshow in iPhoto.
And the payback was worth it, worth the care. I love the sharpness of actual slides, the depth of color that, to my eye, is never matched by any digital projector or plasma screen. Not that there is anything inherently faulty with digital imagery--I love it and work with it daily. It's just different. And why should anyone have to choose? Why can't we use them all, these media tools, and enjoy them?
Why can't we just all get along?
Ah, yes. Because if we did, what would art undergrads have to argue about late at night?
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