Art Kills
Happy Birthday to EyesCoffee.com
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Some people may think that the whole world changed after the 2 planes crashed on the World Trade Center in New York, and the 2 towers collapsed on 11Sep2001.
After 11Sep2001, people around New York were taking photo images. The intention looked quite natural, that people were facing a drastic moment, and finding such way as expression of such personal experience.
Related images overflowed on the Internet. One of them was something like a standard tourist picture, showing a snapshot taken on the roof of one of the tower, one man standing in the foreground, and a plane approaching on the background, with date imprinted at the corner as '09 11 01'. Some people have shown their special concern because it is an image coming from digital composition.
There was an old story happened in around 1600 A.D., "Caravaggio, who was a very imaginative and uncompromising young artist, thought hard about what it must have been like when an elderly poor, working man, a simple publican, suddenly had to sit down to write a book. And so he painted a picture of St. Matthew with a bald head and bare, dusty feet, awkwardly gripping the huge volume, anxiously wrinkling his brow under the accustomed strain of writing. By his side he painted a youthful angel, who seems just to have arrived from on high, and who gently guides the labourer's hand as a teacher may do to a child. When Caravaggio delivered this picture to the church where is was to be placed on the altar, people were scandalized at what they took to be lack of respect for the saint. The painting was not accepted, and Caravaggio has to try again. This time he took no chance. The outcome is still quite a good picture, for Caravaggio had tried hard to make it look lively and interesting, but we feel that it is less honest and sincere than the first had been." (from part of the Introduction of The Story of Art by E. H. Combrich)
In the past, painters challenged the standing of photography as an artform, because of photographic images coming from the real world, rather than a creation from a photographer. Now people challenge digital photography because such unreal images not coming from the real world. It is really a dilemma.
It sounds great when we hear that art can reconstruct our society, or even bring peace to the world. I believe to a certainty that this is unlikely to happen if individually, we even cannot accept the other's artforms or aesthetic viewpoints that are different from us.
Art may not change our history, but history may change our artform.
Over thousands of years, something has not been changed. People are continuing the struggle in pursue of visual images, for spiritual purpose, and something beyond.
Today is 31Dec2001, and EyesCoffee.com is two years old. Happy Birthday.
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