The Artist You Hate

It occurred to me, as I was noodling on something or other, that everyone who thinks about art seems to have a little list of Important Names that they hate.

My list isn't even little, it's an enormous sprawling thing, but if you pay attention you'll find that this guy can't stand Alec Soth but loves Michael Ashkin, while that other guy is exactly reversed. Sometimes it's nuanced, I suppose, perhaps the first guy "gets" Soth, but simply doesn't like what he has to say, but often it seems to be just Soth's photos are just bullshit about nothing, but my guy's photos are awesome. Someone looking from the outside might well propose a pox on all their houses because, holy cow.

The liking tends to be pretty vague, too. In one discussion from a year or two back, a fellow proposed to me that Soth and some others had adopted the look of the snapshot, but within that aesthetic made things that end up being very different. Not to put too fine of a point on it, I don't follow. It's not clear that my correspondent was capable of further elucidating the "very different" elements, and I certainly don't see them. All the snapshot-aesthetic people seem to be to be taking snapshots (which is not necessarily a bad thing.)

Certainly there are photos made by Sally Mann which, taken in isolation, look like a bunch of nothing. I can do a little better, I think, than no, they're something very different in the way of explaining why I like them, but it might come out sounding to you like mystification. Even if I can, this is not really an indication that Ashkin's fans are all wet, maybe they're just not very articulate.

Anyways. As previously noted in these pages ad nauseum we evaluate Art both on the basis of properties inherent in the piece, but also on the basis of social and contextual cues.

Jörg Colberg likes Michael Schmidt's pictures of cement, I like Sally Mann's pictures of underbrush and grass, and someone apparently likes Alec Soth's pictures of drowned bedframes.

Each of us is, in some sense, inside the artist's world. We see the interconnections that give these things meaning beyond the contents of the frame.

The insight here is that in order to make someone like your pictures, you don't want to get into their world, you want them to enter yours.