Politics, Art and the Internet?

Today's political thought for the day comes from a nice little essay over at Znet, please read it.

One of my favourite artists is having major retrospective show at the Met in New York, the reason he is a favourite considering he's actually a painter? He was a connected with one of my favourite Photographers, Frederick Summer. Last year I was fortunate enough to see some real Sommer prints at the CCP in Arizona. Exquisite doesn't begin to describe them, I just wish I had more time to look at them, one day, one day I'll go back.

I sometimes wonder, what Mr Sommers would think of digital photography and technologies? He is renowned for his painstakingly beautiful silver gelatin prints, and his respect for the process involved, the computer has in some ways liberalised this and in other ways cheapened it. I can for example go out, shoot any number of images, dependant only upon my storage medium that I'm carrying, come home and automatically process them quickly, and with a minimum of effort, upload them to the web and head out again for more shooting. Is this a good or a bad thing, does volume of production lower the value of an artistic object? This very argument was had by a bunch of young enthusiastic 1st year art students back in the late 80's, I was one of them, it wasn't resolved in my mind and still isn't although I'm heartened by what I see as a burgeoning art movement involving photocopiers, the internet and public walls.

Flickr is having a massage, so I'll post a few images here, ones that I wanted to work on more on my crt monitor, as the light in Hong Kong really had me tricked, resulting in more underexposure than I would have liked, fortunately they, the images I made in Hong Kong are rescueable.