Dissonance

You never stop learning. I learned that again this morning when I stubbed my toe and cursed the idiot  that left the object on the floor for me to kick. That idiot, it turned out, was me. Not for the first time I found out that if you learn anything in life, you eventually learn you know nothing at all. 

This was again reinforced to me personally by having been recently obliged to select a picture that was considered the best of that week. I very quickly found out it was an impossible task. Within what framework can any piece of art be classed as 'the best'? Art is horribly subjective. Rules and constraints, forget them. Everyone, to a lesser or greater degree, is constrained by their own bias, tastes and beliefs into what is considered 'good' to them. We all know this. 

 

Yet we still tend to defer to the 'experts'. However, what was once considered dreadful by the authoritative cognoscenti, in a decade or two, might then be considered genius by another generation of cognoscenti. Fashion and taste follow the fault lines of social and political change and none of us are immune. Least of all so-called experts. 

 

Inevitably, anyone judging any cutting edge art work must do so on the basis of their past experiences and the outdated considerations of their own and previous generations. Hence,  they will always  be behind the curve. 
Logically the conclusion must then be to ignore the experts. Never follow any current fashion because it's already out of date. Learn your craft and then follow whatever direction works best for you. Failure is simply another word for learning. It's the only way. 

 

Which is a very long winded way of getting to the point, todays featured image, by Ciupureanu Dan which is all about dissonance.

This is not a photograph per se, but a collage of photographs that creates the whole. It goes against my own bias which is towards so-called 'real' photography, hence I naturally struggle to warm to its appreciation. But that's down to my own plebeian artistic limitations, not the fault of the image. This image is interesting to me because of its dissonance. It's 'wrong', and I like that. What does it mean? What does it say? I don't know and the artist doesn't say. But I like thinking about it. And I like that it makes me think about it. I suspect many will not appreciate it very much. But who's fault is that? The artist or the viewer? There's tension in the air, and I rather like that too.

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