To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.
The emphasis on original, individual work in the past years has done a great deal to produce a crop of eccentric fakes and has carried art away from the stream of tradition. Tradition is our heritage of knowledge and experience. We can't get along without it.
Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it.
Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition
Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.
Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.
I don't want to sound like an aesthete, but one has to be true to the art. And that means being true to the tradition of the art but also being true to your own artistic vision.
Seattle has a long tradition of celebrating local and non-local art - from the Burke and Seattle Art Museums to the Asian Art Museum.
There has always been quite a strong black and white art tradition in Australia, with quite a large contingent of cartoonists, given the size of the population.
In art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.
Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime.
All art becomes history as soon as it is made, so it is inevitably part of a tradition. It doesn't matter a toss if it is in paint or in film; it is all art.
The internationalization of art becomes a factor contributing to the estrangement of art from the artist. The sum of works of all times and places stands against him as an entity with objectives and values of its own. In turn, since becoming aware of the organized body of artworks as the obstacle to his own aesthetic self-affirmation, the artist is pushed toward anti-intellectualism and willful dismissal of the art of the past.
