Today at the Museum of Contemporary Photography I saw some really neat images described as “C-Prints.” I imagined this was some sort of fancy process. Nope: any enlargement of a color photo. Some of the other good images turned out to be inkjet printouts. Fancy inkjets to be sure, but inkjets nonetheless.
My grandmother insists that photography isn’t art, and I’m sure she’d hate the digital photomanipulation artists, but I love it, especially the unnatural landscapes that a lot of contemporary artists assemble or find… the supersaturated color of schoolbuses in a flooded parking lot, the stark intensity of a highway interchange, lights blurred from long exposure. It’s as pure a mechanism of conveying emotion and image as, say, drypoint etching, or formal oil painting, or sculpture in bronze.
After the MCP visit, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and reminded myself why I really really really dislike 18th and 19th century painting, especially French and English. That extends to the 17th century in many cases. I know it’s saying a lot to write off three centuries of art, but dammit, it’s all so overblown and melodramatic and… well… foofy. Rococo, Romanticism… I don’t even like impressionists, although I did see a nice etching by Mary Cassat, which, since it was a study for something else, had a sense of immediacy and focus that her more ‘completed’ works didn’t.
Secretly Ironic 