I’m from the Art Community and I’m Here to Help!
Dear applicant,
Our support network is here to see you through the arduous process of becoming assimil… pardon, a successful nature-photo-artist. Our easy-to-follow instructions and friendly staff will answer your questions, guide you through the standard forms, and assist in setting proper boundaries around your powers of creative expression to keep them from getting in your way and making the rest of us look bad.
To begin the process, please review our simple ten-step program:
- Your photograph must be un-manipulated. No, we don’t know how to define it. Just say that it is and we’ll call it good.
- Comply with all arbitrary rules for photo competitions even when they indicate an embarrassing ignorance of art and modern photographic technology. Yes, we know even Ansel Adams’ work would not qualify for most of them, but he’s passé anyway.
- What’s in the frame doesn’t matter. Please tell us about your heroic outdoor feats (even if you only work within 100 ft. of the road), your edition limits, and marketing hyp… umm… message.
- Your art should be accessible. And expensive.
- Beauty is cliché. Do you have anything that will make people angry, suicidal, or at the very least befuddled?
- Please send exorbitant membership fees for our not-for-profit professional association so we can throw elaborate schmooz… we mean networking parties and pay for a crippling bureaucracy of administrators, ineffectual committees and politics that make us look important.
- We believe in Twitter followers as an indicator of importance. If the quality of your work is insufficient to draw the masses, offer prizes.
- If you use a Large Format camera and/or work exclusively in black-and-white, all other qualifications for “fine art” are waived.
- Your work should be original. If it is not, make sure your cover versions are at least very colorful.
- 50% commission is fair and equitable and in everyone’s best interest.
The Art Community is here for you!
Category: Rants and Raves
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry (I’ll choose the former for mental health’s sake). This sums things up far more accurately than it should.
Can you recommend any good sihny prizes?
I love this. Made me laugh, made me cry, made me nod my head in agreement. Now we need the rebel who is going to lead us to the world of creative freedom…
Ha, ha…I think we were writing the same thing at the same time. I guess this is everyone’s experience, sigh…
Where do I sign?
Hilarious! But sad…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole “un-manipulated” scam recently. Bizarre stuff.
As always, a great read, Guy.
Dan
Oh my. Guy, do I detect a touch, maybe just a little, of sarcasm?
I couldn’t have said it better myself, a great read and fitting since I just entered some photo contests (luckily their rules weren’t too condescending or from a stance of ignorance).
Jim
How true. Very early on in my photographic adventures I had a professor of photography tell me that my work wasn’t as good as his first semester students who had just begun. This was after 10 years of photography, graduating from two schools of photography, teaching it in the military and working as a freelance photojournalist for 2 years. The reason I wasn’t good? My work wasn’t esoteric enough.
I’ve now been photographing for over half a century and was recently told much the same by another art professor. At times I want to declare a pox on the art world.
Oh this is great Guy, but I’d really love to see a satirical version.
Fantastic, just awesome
infuriatingly true.
Brilliantly funny!
Oh my gawd! This is excellent!
This is funny and sad. I see it as failure of education to provide people with judgement criteria with which to evaluate art. It’s not just in photography that the basis for evaluation is so amiss. It’s an issue of lack of platform.
The “Beauty is cliché” item is spot-on. It always seems that the winners of any fine art photography competition are photographs of depressed-looking people in depressing rooms looking depressed.
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This is a great commentary! I think the comments from Saurabh Deoras are also right on the money. People seem to have lost the ability to evaluate almost everything from an objective viewpoint. It seems to be more about hype and rhetoric rather than substance.