When I go out to take photographs, I try to do so when the light is good. Early morning or late afternoon, for example. A time when the light is warm and if there is water about (low lying mist is a bonus) producing interesting reflections, then all the better. Then there’s composition. Now, while the rule of thirds generally applies, I don’t always follow it. I do, however, try to make sure that there is something of interest to catch the viewer’s eye and draw it into the image. If there is some colour, all the better.
This, then is an image taken a few years back by the river Avon at Keynsham.
I’ve always like this picture, not least because I had to get up early to get it.
However, I now realise that I’m doing it all wrong. No, what I should be doing is going out any old time when the lighting is flat and take a dull, uninteresting snapshot. That way, I could sell it for £2.7m.
Only one thing ‘good’ about that image – it has knocked Cindy Sherman off top spot.
That’s the woman who ONLY photographs herself dressed up to represent other people – real or imagined (including imagined actors in non-existent films)
God in Heaven! I know there’s ne born every minute but he must have had time to put his horse around the back and take off his spurs and stetson too!
Gursky’s photograph was not a morning snapshot though.
It was all planned. Taken on a Linhoff plate camera, then the image was digitised and worked on to remove any minute element from the scene that was not what the artist wanted, then printed as a 3.5 metre wide piece of art.
It is not a photograph, it is art. That you question its value, makes it art. It is valuable because at least two rich people wanted to buy it – for whatever reason. And good for them. It makes the world a more interesting place.
Who was it who said there was a sucker born every minute?
He vastly underestimated….
“at Keynsham”
Well there’s your problem then. Keynsham cannot be art. Bath might be, Bristol (parts of) could be, but Keynsham is just the arse end of the universe and therefore cannot be art.
No, no, believe me, I come from around there (not Keynsham, thankfully, I have teeth and am literate….I even have a family tree, not a family pole) this is true.
Hell’s teeth! Good picky LR. As to the Kraut I have a load of much better pictures in a similar sort of vein taken with my (then completely new Sony on a Cumbrian beach.
As an (ex) LRPS and who used to work for “K” you need contrast, low light angles, planes and shadows and highlights ….
(your photo) there’s too much bridge (dark stuff at the top – IMO – tho IANAP) but it’s still a bugger sight more interesting than that Rhine photo. £2 1/2 million?! that’s just for people who’ve got too much money and can’t light cigars fast enough.
Er, no, what makes it art is the pretentious wankery, complete lack of discernible talent and the willingness of the gullible to ignore the emperor’s nakedness and part with large sums of money for the privilege of being conned.
If I crop any more, I lose the side of the bridge, and I wanted to keep some of it for the purposes of framing the rest of the image. It’s a wide bridge, so can’t really do much about it.
Saw this in the week and couldn’t quite believe it myself.
Yes, I suppose we could take on board Voyager’s comments about the process – but that’s just the process. Does all that make it art? Or just pretentious wankery as LR said?
Anyway, good luck to him I suppose. If there’s a market out there then Gursky has been able to tap into it – and you’ll never find me criticising the market.
Still a complete waste of money in my view though.
Agreed. If people want to spend vast sums of money on an image any half decent photographer would instantly delete because it is dull, lacking in any interest or contrast, let alone a focal point – indeed displays every beginning amateur’s schoolboy errors, then it’s their money to burn and I wouldn’t dream of stopping them.
It’s rather on a par with falling out of bed after a night of drunken debauchery, surveying the dishevelled and unsavoury aftermath, calling it “art” and (successfully) submitting it for the Turner prize. If that particular tableau can end up centre-stage in the Tate Modern, then anything is possible. 😯
Utter, utter wankery.
Harry Enfield’s “I saw you coming” sketches spring to mind.
LR, sure you don’t get it. That’s fine. But no one is making you pay for it. Personally I’d like to see the original, not some tiny representation on this TFT, before commenting on its attributes.
Still can’t understand why anyone needs to get so upset that the art world seems barmey. There are lots of things in this world that have a lofty perceived values that seem pretty pointless to me but, thankfully, there are also lots of things that don’t seem to have much value that I appreciate.
I didn’t say that I was upset. I am merely pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. There’s nothing to get; it is a bland, piss-poor image that if entered into the local club competition would be slated for all the reasons I’ve given.
“..it is a bland, piss-poor image that if entered into the local club competition would be slated…”
LR, that is becasue local photographic clubs are generally a parochial bunch of talentless drones though, not because Gursky’s photograph has no merit *as art*.
Talentless drones they may be (I dispute that from my experience, despite frequently disagreeing with them) – but I’ve never seen any of them produce anything quite so utterly dreadful as Gursky’s image which does not have merit as art. Anyone with a cheap compact could produce an image like that – and frequently do. That such garbage is passed off as art merely cheapens the concept.
Clearly Gursky’s image DOES have merit as art as more than one person was willing to bid for the print.
That just means there’s more than one person with more money than sense. It doesn’t mean that the picture has any merit. If the same image was produced by someone outside of the incestuous art world, it wouldn’t fetch a penny.
You better look for these rich folk to buy your picture then.
If it is so easy you need not bother to look for a job, just get up early a few days a year and snap away!
Well done for managing to completely miss my point.
I knew from your comment about ‘deleting’ the image becasue it was ‘dull, lacking in any interest or contrast, let alone a focal point’ that you don’t have the slightest imagination about what Gursky is doing with the piece (indeed that is perfect photo club drone shite), but what exactly do you imagine I am ‘missing’?
Because all you have done is listed your dull imaginary rules that an image ‘must have’ and failed to comprehend that this is not a photograph, it is a piece of art. The fact that Gursky can see a way of creating an uneasy work that we question yet it is also clearly a modern version of the landscape albeit shorn of everything that you imagine a landscape should have.
A metaphor for human existence? A bleak depiction of our world? Nah, you get that from a snap of a canal can’t you?
Well, you’ve got the artspeak wankery off pat, haven’t you? I can’t quite recall the last time I read such asinine drivel.
The image is dull, lacking in imagination, interest and contrast. This is a matter of objective observation.
I have plenty of imagination, which is why I recognise a good image when I see one and this ain’t it. He’s not doing anything at all – apart from pulling off a con-trick. And, no it isn’t photo club drone shite – look in any manual on landscape photography or painting and you will see the very things I’ve mentioned here. Yes, you can break the rules, but I would expect to see something a little special when someone does. Gursky hasn’t produced anything special at all; merely a dreadful snap that I would expect to see a beginner producing before they understand the basics of composition and exposure – so, no, I’m not remotely interested in yet another piece of wankery dressed up as art, because it isn’t art at all.
And “uneasy work” oh, please, stop with the pretentious nonsense already. It’s a very tedious and poor image that lacks anything of merit. The word you are looking for is “crap”.
Jeebus! Fuckwittery of the first order. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a picture and not a very good one; a bland image that a con-artist has persuaded the gullible to believe is something more than it is. The emperor has no clothes. He is naked, nude, bare.
Oh, and the missing point? That someone is prepared to pay large sums of money for something is not necessarily a measure of its worth. Ask Gerald Ratner.
Of course, I could have you all wrong here and you could just be joshing. At least, I hope so. No one in their right mind comes out with such cack and actually means it.
I know what the word ‘crap’ should be used for. Dull pictures of canals taken by people with no imagination.
These are the same people who really think that their piece of crap is ‘worth’ something simply because they are too dumb to understand how the art market has always worked.
Nothing wrong with Keynsham. It has a very good proper butchers. The faggots are excellent.
I had fond memories of it even before I visited it. It was the home for the biggest scam of the fifties and sixties, after all…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Batchelor
And the Bonzo Dog Doo Da Band even named an album after it. Can’t be more famous than that can you? Well unless you are Portishead (which IS a bit of a dump apart from the pitch and putt course with spectacular views over the Bristol Channel) Whatever happened to them?
As to you Voyager, I thought you were in the outer reaches of the Heliosphere by now 😉 No, it is a piece of utter crap. Just calling it Art doesn’t make it so. But all hail market forces I say! And does anyone have the “artist’s” agents number? We have a shedload of stuff way more interesting than that which will blow up quite nicely (I’ll even put a time fuse and jelly on it, and call it Performance Art if they like) 😆
Voyager, your increasing resorts to the ad hom – not only directed at me, but a whole bunch of people whose work you have never seen says far more about your bigotry than it does about me. Gursky’s work is crap. This is an objective assessment of an image that has nothing going for it. If the same image had been produced by an amateur photographer, the people who are willing to shell out millions for a Gursky wouldn’t give it a second glance. The art world is riddled with snobbery and you have given us a fine demonstration of the genre. Well done.
Longrider, the point is not that a photo like that would ever be considered worthy by an *amateur photographer*.
It is not a ‘photograph’ it is an artwork that happens to be partly created by photographic methods. It is about an idea and not about an image. The bland ‘rules’ about light, composition and ‘rule of thirds’ you imagine must be followed do not have to apply.
That you cannot fathom that says more about your increasingly tedious, blinkered opinions than anything about me. As I wrote earlier, if you think you can create an image that will sell, do so. But you haven’t got the imagination or the ability to do more than snap a canal.
Ah, yes, the good old you don’t understand canard – the last refuge of someone who has catastrophically lost the argument. I understand perfectly. Gusrky’s work is a picture, nothing more, nothing less. It is not a very good picture. Indeed, it is a very poor picture. Only in the incestuous pretentiousness of the art world is it anything more than that. But, then, only in such a rarefied atmosphere is an unmade bed or block of bricks anything more than crap served up as a work of art. Something that the rest of us can see for precisely what it is – crap.
That you have swallowed this claptrap hook line and sinker and cannot or will not see the confidence trick for what it is says all we need to know about you. As does your use of the term “amateur photographer” as a pejorative. Some of the finest work I’ve seen – that far eclipses Gursky’s dire image – has come from amateurs.
And, yes, I have sold the odd picture or two, thanks very much. I don’t do it for that, though, I do it for personal pleasure and I have sufficient imagination to recognise a good image when I see one. I can also recognise a bad one – even when it is passed off as “art”.
There speaks the voice of pure ignorance and bigotry. Well done.
LR, what you lack is a line of bullshit to “convince” a bunch od pretentious wankers that your photograph is, indeed, art.
Yeah, I know. Ain’t gonna happen, though. I haven’t the patience for such arse dribble.
Voyager, please read the Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, then you might see much of modern Art for what it really is, an almighty case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
I’ve read it. Some decades ago though. And if I remember correctly, while he is probably right (albeit somewhat dated – the book was written 40 years ago) about the change from objectification of art to the ascent of art theory, that is not the the end of the story.
The way art is understood, dealt and appreciated undoubtedly has changed in the last 50/60 years. Since Wolfe’s book was printed the ‘Art’ market has changed beyond what he could imagine and is now seen in a totally different way to that our parents might have understood.
Will this always be so? I don’t know, but I’d wager that Gusrky’s piece will sell for even more next time it is on the market than it just did. Is it worth it? Clearly some think so. Would I buy it? No, but I’d like to see it hanging somewhere. The one in the Tate Modern is a smaller print.
Dave Allan Green has some comments to make about art – http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-art-and-art-exhibitions.html
The fact that Christies has to explain it with the words
“not invited to consider a specific place along the river, but rather an almost ‘platonic’ ideal of the body of water as it navigates the landscape”.
shows that it is not art but pretensious crap. Art is whatever the person sees in their own way. Being told what it is means it is not art.
Very well put. The reality is that the art world uses wibble to bamboozle the gullible. The rest of us, unaffected by the pompous codswallop parroted by art critics about it being a “metaphor” or an “idea”, see exactly what is there, and what is there is a picture, nothing more, nothing less. And it is as a picture, uncontaminated by the arse dribble that we can judge it.
This particular picture features a stretch of water that may or may not be a stretch of the Rhine. The top two thirds of the image consist of a featureless grey sky. The bottom third is evenly lit, but dull, the colours are muddy and there is no focal point to draw interest. In short, it is boring.
The principles I mentioned about what makes a good image are not hard and fast rules (as I said earlier, they can be broken by someone who understands them), but they acknowledge how our brains process an image. It’s how – despite not being “arty” – the average Joe can recognise the difference between a good image and a poor one.
This, then, is a poor one. Claims that those of us who recognise it as such “don’t get it” or “don’t understand” or are “photo club drones” is just so much bunkum. We get it all right and we understand perfectly. It’s a pile of poo.
Notwithstanding preconceptions aroused by your post and knowledge of the price for which the work sold, I found the print strangely serene and worth the time spent looking at it.
Whether it is worth the price paid depends upon certain attributes of the prospective purchasers.
I might spend a percentage of my wealth on acquiring a print (though the size and materials alone would put this particular example out of my reach), but let’s say I’d invest 2.5% of my annual income (I can’t use net worth since that is negative – thanks Gordon A). This suggests that someone with an income in excess of $172 million would be making the same proportionate decision – assuming that the marginal value of a dollar of income remained the same, which it doesn’t: the marginal value of the 172 millionth dollar would be pretty much zero. The purchaser is also possibly buying the artist’s name not the print.
Artists have expressed negative opinions on the purchasers of their works and the excessive sums they were prepared to pay – Dali and Warhol spring to mind.
Next time I am near the Tate Modern I shall investigate the work reportedly displayed there.
Thanks.
Winston Smith
Don’t be silly Winston, you don’t want to go and see that. The art critic Longrider has decreed that it is a ‘pile of poo’, you are not allowed an opinion and that is the end of the matter.
Seriously, they do move things around in the galleries, so check it is on display when you visit. But they do have a smaller one of the 6 versions of the print.
Don’t be such a fuckwit, Voyager no one said you are not allowed to have an opinion. It is, however, fairly obvious that you are incapable of taking criticism of yours without resorting to insult, ad hom and petty, blatant misrepresentation of what was said. We saw this last year when I had the effrontery to point out perfectly reasonably that the great Saint Steve of Jobs (PBUH) was a control freak. That this was a matter of record, made no difference, same old claptrap from you following the same tired pattern of insult, ad hom and misrepresentation. On another, you resorted to accusations of lying. So far, I’ve been pretty patient with your behaviour. Time to call a halt, frankly. I’m growing weary of it.
I’m not an art critic. I am an ordinary person who can see through the bullshit just as I can recognise a 419 when it lands in my inbox. So, yes, pile of poo.
So are these – and I know which I would rather see hanging on my wall 😉
That very much being a point I made earlier in this discussion. The image itself has no merit – if it did, someone with a compact could make the same money with the same image. It’s all about image…
Didn’t you recently post that you would not accept comments that say “you don’t understand”? (And you have repeated that sentiment at 10:24)
I really appreciate your pic and agree that Gursky’s is rubbidge. I regret deeply that I followed this comment trail.
This comment trail is what prompted that post – that and a follow up comment along the same lines a day or so later. That said, I wasn’t going to go back and retrospectively delete – simply laying down future ground rules.
I don’t want to get in the middle of this argument, but I think we are into apples and oranges territory. Judging the Gursky picture by the standards of photography is like judging a ballet on a gymnastics scorecard. I’m never happy about the use of the word ‘objectively’ when it comes to art, as the whole topic is about as subjective as it comes. To say Gursky’s work is ‘objectively’ bad is just plain wrong to me. All we can say is that, subjectively, we don’t like or admire it, and leave it at that. Most of modern art, the unmade beds and the pickled sharks, leaves me cold, but I have to say I rather like this one. I would happily have it in my home, suitably downsized and downpriced. It is peaceful and balanced and I could look at it for hours. I also like good photography, but the two are not the same thing and should not be judged on the same basis.
Actually, we are not. I don’t give a fig whether it is “art”, a photograph, both or neither, it is a picture and as such, I can make an objective assessment of it. My use of the term objective was precise and intentional.
Does the image have a focal point? No. What about overall composition? Well, a good two thirds is sky, which would be fine if there was some interest there. As it is, it is bleached out and featureless. This leads to another problem, the camera’s meter has tried to compensate for this and the slightly underexposed foreground is under saturated leading to muddy colours.
Every one of those observations is objective. Just to drive home that point, from time to time, I submit images to a photo library. If I was to submit this one in my name, it would be rejected for every one of the points I have made above. The people who make the decision to accept an image do so using objective criteria – the most important being “can we sell it?” If this was under my name rather than Gursky’s the answer would be an emphatic “no”.
Every one of the images I have referenced in this discussion is both technically and aesthetically superior – whether you call it photography or art (they are the same thing anyway). What Gursky and the other so-called artists are doing is passing off dross in the name of art and in so doing they besmirch the very concept. They insult those who had and have real talent, who can pick up a brush or chisel and produce something of beauty and quality. So, yes, my artistic tastes are conservative, but I value real talent when I see it and I’m not seeing it here.
Sure, some may like this image – you do, so do Winston and Voyager, and all I can say to that is; there’s no accounting for taste – and that taste is indeed subjective.
“photography or art (they are the same thing anyway).”
That’s the whole issue in a sentence. You think they are the same, and can therefore be judged on similar criteria. Others (including me) think they are not the same at all, and that using the criteria for one to judge the other is a category error.
I doubt if we could ever agree on this, but it makes for interesting debate.
I’ve had this discussion plenty of times over the years. Some folk are adamant that photography is not an art form.
Photography is both an art and a science. So, yes, they are the same. It requires creativity to produce the image and photography is a tool to do it, just as is the brush and palette. The principles of image construction remain the same – light, contrast, composition, focal point, colour saturation and so on. Talk to a painter or a photographer, they both talk the same language, because they are both doing the same thing; producing a work of art.
“Some folk are adamant that photography is not an art form.”
Not me. I think photography comes well within the definition of ‘art’ (and also science, as you say). But it is one of many art forms, and has its own accepted criteria for judgement and evaluation, just as music, sculpture and so on have. What you say about judging photographs in your comments above is quite correct. However, my understanding is that the artwork in question began as a photograph but has been processed and manipulated to a high degree. If so, it should be judged, not as a photograph but on its own terms. To put it simply, if Rhein II is a photograph, then all you have said is correct. If it is no longer a photograph but something else, then you are judging it too narrowly.
To judge it on its own terms is a cop out, frankly. It is an excuse used by modern artists to avoid having to use competence when constructing their art.
While I accept that art does not always have to be a thing of beauty, I will judge it on its technical competence as well as its aesthetics. What we have here is a mediocre image of a stretch of water that could be the Sedgemoor drain that has been photoshopped. Wow! Any fule can do that. Because it is done by an “artist” does not make it art. It is and always will be a mediocre image that is flat, dull and uninteresting that has been photoshopped. No amount of stating that it has been manipulated to a high degree changes any of that.
Those images of autumn that I linked to are works of art. They are competently produced and are things of beauty to behold – above all else, the photographers have taken the time and effort to produce images that have atmosphere and mood. Gursky could have done that if he had tried. He was just too damned lazy – or incompetent.