Am I creating art? What is art? Is it art because we are told it is?
I was very interested in the response by Sam Abel that his work could never be on the cover of an art catalogue or on the walls of the Guggenheim museum or accepted by the art community, but the appropriated image from Prince could sit there comfortably and sell for $1.5M. This I found very strange and provoking.
What makes something worthy of being in a gallery? What makes something art? Is it only art if we are told it is? Or does it depend on the person presenting the work?
Richard Prince, Untitled Cowboy #5, 2001
So, I thought I would turn to social media and see what their reaction to an image is if they don’t know the source. I chose a reasonably obscure image from William Eggleston and asked for feedback on the image. I also posed this question to photography groups. The replies were quite interesting. I specifically chose Eggleston for this project as most social media photography groups tend towards the pretty images of landscapes, birds in the wild and other such things. Eggleston and his work is fairly obscure in these circles, and certainly outside of the norm for image consumption.
William Eggleston, Untitled 1983-1986
Some people immediately dismissed the image as nonsense, and even cited me as trolling the group. Others were intrigued by it and why it had been posted. They then researched looking for meaning and interpretation of the image, by seeing what else I had posted previously to that group. Since this image did not stack with the pretty pictures I had posted before, this also seemed to lend credence to the image having more merit and interpretation that they should search for.
Interesting to note that they were seeking out what else the photographer had done and why this image should be considered.
Other people simply gave me technical feedback on the image with use of colour and composition being the main components of the feedback.
Few people actually spotted it was an image by Eggleston, but the ones that did had a mixed reaction. Some then spotted what I was trying to do and were even more interested in the experiment as a result, looking to see how their peers would also react. Others were outraged that I had posted a picture and not credited the photographer and thinking that I was trying to pass this off as my image, which I did not do, I never once claimed that it was my image. I simply did not disclose it was an Eggleston image as this would have changed the result of the experiment.
The responses seem to indicate that we respond to something being art when it’s in the context of art, if it’s placed as art in a gallery or such. Also, the esteem or merits of the person presenting the work as art has a large impact on how viable the image is a being accepted as art or not with only a few dismissing it based on their initial reaction to the image alone. The ones in the social media group dismissing it immediately as nonsense or trolling, I wonder would they stop and think harder if they saw it on the walls of a gallery or the name of the creator being disclosed?
