Art Basel Miami Beach starts today, which means artists, dealers, and wealthy collectors are gearing up for a few days of frenzied buying, selling, and liquored-up party-hopping.
Inclusion in the event is a huge marker of one’s rank in the art world and this year, everyone is buzzing about a new photography exhibit.
Why? Because it’s not the usual snaps of naked, long-haired hipster girls in the forest. Instead, it features fashion photography straight from the pages of our favorite magazines.
The exhibit – “In Fashion ‘07” – includes 200 photos taken by 20 leading fashion photographers including Miles Aldridge, Christiane Draffehn, Matthew Brookes, and Kanjo Take — and is up through Sunday at Miami’s Doubletree Surfcomber Hotel.
The show is seen as a political statement about the status of commercial fashion photographers as artists. The curator, Marion de Beaupre, ask us to think of it , “as an art form created under restrictions.”
Do you see fashion photographers as artists? Do they provoke viewers with arresting and provocative images, or is it too commercial to pass as art?
–ALISON COOL
Tags: Art Basel
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Fashion photographers are certainly artists. We have to admit that modern art is all commercial, in the respect that it sells an idea and a vision to the consumer just as a fashion spread sells the clothes on display.
- NHA
Yes, absolutely. Some of the most amazing art is commercial. (Some of the most amazing works of art are commercials. I once saw 3 art history Ph.D.s stop dead in their tracks at a billboard advertising soy sauce. (Not kidding. I was just an undergrad at the time, but to this day it’s one of the most provocative, socially loaded images I’ve ever seen.))
I also think comic books and couture are art. And give it three hundred years and someone will probably be writing dissertations on those Lisa Frank pocket folders.
Some magazines and companies definitely treat their editorials and advertisements as art and those are the ones that usually shock people or offend people or make people write letters about how “they cant even see the clothes” or some other random thing.
This is also not the first time that fashion photography gets the art treatment, there was an exhibit a couple years back at the MoMA and also one at the National Portrait Gallery in the UK.
Because it’s commercial doesn’t disqualify it from being art, of course. I’ve spent years feeling young and naive about such perceptions and that this question always needs to be asked over and over used to enrage me but I’ve deduced the whole thing to this: if it’s pretty and expensive it’s going to continue to be suspect in many people’s eyes. The expression of the same types of suspicions should be expected of architecture and film making but you rarely hear the fervor against their claims to the label ‘art.’ I can’t help but think anything associated with fashion will have an exceptionally high hurdle to get over. Is it an issue of femininity? I think that has something to do with it.
I am going on Saturday!