Do you think David’s rant was a thoughtful or meaningful criticism of a “standard” qway of displaying work on the medium in question?
It wasn't a rant, it was an opinion, as I underlined with "FWLIW - for what little it is worth". If you think that me having opinions equates to me being a "wanker", well that reflects more on you I'm afraid. I think this is the first time I've ever been tempted to click on "Report to Moderator" on this site, if indeed any, but since we have a very good moderator I'll leave that up to him.
If I may expand on my opinion, at risk of being labelled as, I don't know, a child molestor this time, it comes from as Andrew stated, being totally fed up by the identical websites published by the MFA world and its camp followers, which are almost always characterless to the point of tedium, incorporate navigation and scrolling which doesn't even work on touch screens, provides not a HINT of personality or engagement with the audience.. I could go on (in fact I already have).
This may not matter to others, and they are of course welcome to tell me that they think otherwise, and they think that I'm overreacting, but for me, presentation is important, and this counts equally in print and on screen. A badly designed website, or book, to me says that the photographer / artist doesn't really care very much, or has no design sensibility. And, as an aside, in fact, Lula used to be like that - pre Kevin days, the web design was appalling - remember the yellow text on black background, the awful drop shadows, then random typography? Michael Reichmann, for all his considerable merits both as a person and as photographer, did not appear to have much of a clue about design. The Kevin-driven redesign was a huge step forward, and in general there was plenty of evidence that Kevin has far more developed design sensibility.
So, when I'm presented with a web site like Mark Sommerfeld's, my first reaction is "he doesn't care, why should I".
Right, James Clark, if it's ok with you I'm off for a wank, er, walk.