[Leica] Re: Miscellany

[Paul and Paula Butzi <butzi@halcyon.com>]

Regarding the question "What is art?", I suspect that we're unlikely to
improve
on the words of Louis Armstrong.  When asked "What is Jazz?", he replied
"If you have to ask, you'll never know."

In the final analysis, "Is it art?" is an uninteresting question compared to
other possibilities: Does it move me?  Will it move you?  Does it make you
angry, sad, elated?  Is it beautiful?  Are people changed by it?  Is the
change permanent?  Positive?

Henry James suggested the following questions might be applied to
art: What was the artist trying to achieve?  Did he/she succeed?
Was it worth it?

Re criticism/feedback:

It's important to keep the feedback you get in perspective.  If you take a 
dozen photographs, and ask six people to select the six best images, you'll
get eight different answers.  Some of the images that one person intensely
dislikes will be the favorites of someone else.  It's neither possible nor
desirable to produce images which please everyone.  I'd suggest that
it *is* important to produce images which are meaningful to *you*.

Likewise, remember that if you want to do extraordinary work, then it will
*by definition* be different from what everyone else does.  That's fine, but
I guarantee that some people will not like it just because it's different.
And
like most things, there is a converse danger - the fact that it's different
doesn't make it good.  We've all seen art that was done with the primary
goal of being 'different'.  

Finally, criticism becomes a little easier to handle if you keep in mind
the words of David Bayles and Ted Orland in "Art and Fear" - the function
of ninety-nine percent of your art is to teach you how to make the one
percent that soars.  To make one piece of good art, you need to be willing
to make a lot of bad art, and learn from doing it.  The question shouldn't
be "Is it good?" but rather "Does it enable you to move closer to making
the work that *is* good?"

(What?  You haven't read "Art and Fear"?  What the hell are you doing
reading this drivel written by me?  You should be driving to the bookstore
to pick up your own copy of the best book ever written on artistic
process, and clearing your schedule to read it!  ISBN 0-88496-379-9,
Capra Press, Santa Barbara.)

- -Paul