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                             Yeah, but is it art?

Bunny and I went to the Boca Raton Museum of Art [1]. Bunny was interested in
seeing their current exhibitions [2], “Shock of the Real” and “Duane Hanson
[3]: Sculpture and Photographs 1978–1995.

Bunny had initially thought that the “Shock of the Real” was a photography
exhibit, but instead it turned out to be a series of photo-realistic
paintings by several artists. She was amazed at the level of detail until I
told her that most of the paintings were probably done by projecting the
image onto the canvas and traced (only a few were described as being done
this way, but I suspect most of them were done that way), as many Renaissance
artists [4] are suspected of using the camera obscura [5]. This upset her
quite a bit.

You see, we'd been having a months long discussion on artistic endeavours,
the use of tools and the necessity of talent in artistic expression, and even
the actual definition of “art” (one of my art teachers in FAU (Florida
Atlantic University) [6] defined art as “that which is useless for survival”—
an apt definition when you think about it). It would be difficult for me to
sum up the current state of our debate and our individual stances (Bunny was
initially horrified at the very thought of Microsoft's Songsmith [7], yet I
loved the idea, but she understands musical theory and I don't, and she's
softening her stance on that particular piece of software; I loathe PHP, but
I understand programming, yet PHP allows non-programmers the ability to
create dynamic websites, which I think is pretty neat (but I still wouldn't
want to work with such code)—told you it was difficult to explain, much less
sum up).

She felt at first that the photo-realistic artists were cheating by tracing
photographs in oil, acrylic or watercolors (and man, some of them were hard
to tell from photographs up close), but I reminded her of my final project in
Drawing I at college—a self portrait, I totally cheated. I photocopied my
hand (it was on an older photocopier—high contrast black and white). I then
smeared powered graphite over drawing paper, then “traced” the photocpy on a
light box using an eraser. Not only did I get an “A” on the project, but it
was later stolen out of my office at IBM [8] when I worked there (not only
did I create “art” but I've had my “art” stolen!). Bunny thought I took a
novel approach though, and this, coupled with a few more hours of discussion,
began to soften her opinion on the cheating photo-realistic artists.

We both found the Duane Hanson exhibit less controversial, although still
very interesting.

[1] http://www.bocamuseum.org/
[2] http://www.bocamuseum.org/index.php?submenu=exib_current&src=gendocs&ref=Current%20Exhibitions&category=Exhibitions
[3] http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/duane_hanson.htm
[4] http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=renaissance+art&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura
[6] http://www.fau.edu/
[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E
[8] http://www.ibm.com/

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