My Piece in Breakthrough - photo series
(Just another excuse to dwell on Yoko Ono, perhaps?)
above - My original photo of Yoko Ono’s Telephone Piece, as seen at the Berkeley Art Museum.
above - Steve Rhodes’ photo of my photo as seen in Breakthrough: An Amateur Photography Revolution at the San Francisco Fine Arts Commission Gallery. Not only has it been re-contextualized by being cropped to 8″ x 10″ and printed out (the original image was never intended to be viewed on anything other than Flickr), but curator Chuck Mobley has added a “comment” on the piece in two ways. First by including it in this group of photos, titled “Some exhibitions I never got to see but kind of wish I had”, and secondly by adding an actual “comment” below the image ala Flickr, which reads:
Yoko Ono
The phone piece! If you’ve ever been in a room with that phone you can appreciate the monomaniacal focus of this tense and isolating image. Now do yourself a favour and go buy her new record “Yes, I’m a Witch.”
Finally, here’s a photo of Steve’s photo as displayed on my Sony Monitor. Which one of these is art again? Which one is not art?
I know someone who sincerely, honestly believes that anything is art if you say or feel it is. I always felt that sentiment was a cop-out, and I’ve never bought it. I shoot 99% of my pictures for no other purpose than documentation, none of the photos I’ve ever shot has been intended or conceived as art. Did my photo become art because a curator “elevated” its status by putting it on the wall in a gallery? Was it art to begin with, despite my non-art intentions?
