I think your world view is uncomfortably narrow...it actually says more about YOU than Alain...I don't think you can see the forrest for the trees (which you seem to shoot a lot of :~).
Yes, but you can at least see some of my images, like them or loathe them, I'm not going to say things about other photographers without having the balls to put my words into context. If you come back armed with some images I can link to I'll perhaps take you seriously.
Alain, you will appreciate the sixteen points to being a fine artist are what gets my goat, not your work. But if you take any work and strip away context it becomes meaningless in terms of 'fine art'. And the reason it becomes meaningless is that
art is driven by society and culture, investigations into ideas, new perspectives on older ideas, new techniques (yes!) that redefine how people percieve the world. But to be successful art is never art for arts sake. This is what tripped up the Pictorialists, there was no connection with the world that the photographer inhabited. And so as a movement it died, but not before Strand and Adams and Evans etc jumped ship and put themselves into the real world, with real world concerns to explore. The demise of Pictorialism was nothing to do with style, it was the lack of content.
You mention Impressionism as an icon of beauty. I wouldn't disagree. But hark back. Impressionism when newly out of the box was considered ugly daubing, not only were the artists using colour like it had never been used before, but their subject matter was of things that had never been painted before. They painted the modern world in a modern way, and the cultural context was clear. But above all it was the ideas that made them artists. So beauty has its own historical context as well.
While your sixteen points may be a primer to get onto the ladder of art there is nowhere to go when you get to the top. You reach the goal and can do all those things to perfection, but why? The guy who can mount a bigger and better print isn't going to be a better artist than the guy with an idea, even though ironically they may be a better paid. A more worthwhile sixteen points towards kitting out an artist with idea's and opinion's about the world would perhaps be cultural stimuli, lets imagine the first few,
1/ Watch John Ford's 'The Searchers'
2/ Read Tom Wolfe's 'Bonfire of the Vanities'
3/ Read Susan Sontag 'On Photography' (if you can stay awake)
4/ Listen to Aaron Copland
5/ Listen to Eminem
and etc.
You cannot teach somebody to be an artist, they either respond to stimuli or they don't. But you can teach somebody to be a technician, very good photographers, but a world away from artists.
Steve
