Comments on: But Is It Art?

By: guest

guest — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:26:05 +0000

I am going on Saturday!

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:50:40 +0000

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.

By: Laia

Laia — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:32:08 +0000

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.

By: FWD

FWD — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:03:01 +0000

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.

By: guest

guest — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:54:54 +0000

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