Art and Represenation

Art and Representation

The camera can be made to lie… I agree with Hockney. I have always felt that photography along with other art forms is subjective. In photography you see a fraction of a seconds worth of information, no more. There is going to be a great deal of the story that is left out. We as the viewers will never fully realize the events that occurred prior or post photograph. Being handed a relatively small amount of information we can my insightful observations but the photograph can and often is misleading.
"For a work of art you need the hand, the eye and the heart. Many people would video that moment, but again, the video would turn it into a performance. Fellini says everything in front of the camera's a performance."
This passage references a lot of what we have been discussing. How far can the artist be removed from the working process before it is no longer his work of art? I am relatively unfamiliar with video/performance based work. This being said I would argue that tenderness can be conveyed and the fact that it may or may not be stage is irrelevant to the emotions being conveyed. If it is fact or fiction is not the argument but whether or not the moment holds emotion. I would say that video, film, and paintings all can and have captured emotion.
I have never read Plato’s Republic however; I was shocked to read that Artist would be removed for their representation of lies. What is a culture a society without art? Artistic social critics are essential for cultural growth especially in a system like a Republic where peoples’ voices are heard.
I was taken by Gerhard Richter work. His work appeared highly spiritual. It was described as dreamlike and that seems to me to be a very accurate assessment. I felt as though he might have been referencing some of the work Yves Kline was doing as well.
Photography freed Art by allowing it to focus on ideology rather than representation. Is this true? Throughout the majority of Art History, art has been focused on interpreting the world around us. The meaning behind much of the art done prior to written record is, of course, up for interpretation, however it clearly does seem to represent the natural world and the influence it has on us as human beings. I am sure there have always been those that use art as a means representation but there have been those that used it to convey higher meaning pushing it in a more ideological direction. I do suspect photography helped push art into a more conceptual oriented route though not the only cause. As time progresses societies have a tendency to become more and more complex and this too would affect the art world.