Art cheats?

This may be old news to some of you but...

Reading an interview with David Hockney a few weeks back(yes he's still alive) and also a few other recent sources it is likely that painters like Caravaggio and the Dutch masters (most notably Vermeer) used camera obscura to get accurate representation of what they were painting and therefore 'cheated' in their composition of art.

Does this take away from the artistry of their compositions? Or was the pinhole camera just a veritable tool - like many others - that does not diminish a work with its use. I mean yes it is easy to trace an image but to make the piece complete, technique, brushwork and other variables or important.
Would you look at these artists' works differently now?

Artists use technology to create their art these days. Hockney himself (in the same article) says he composes all his pictures now on the iPad and has found some very innovative uses of the iPad.

Funny how it's only considered a cheat if it's this amazing thing called a 'PAINTING' yet if it's a just a drawing it's just an inconsequential incomplete black, grey and white textured thing

Ask yourself if it's cheating to use preliminary pencil sketches for the composition of the 'real work'

Further when the Kodak camera came along and artists used it why were they just photographers and not artists?

Because anyone could operate one!

Thus proving that everyone's an artist, but some need the right medium and incentive - if photography had remained in the realm of daguerretypes and the hassle kept it an obscure novelty artists would still have eventually discovered it

If glass plate photography remained the order of the day - still would have been artists choosing to use it

If the cam obs 'helped' an artist reach their goal/potential, well stiff peanuts - artists have been appropriating whatever becomes available since the beginning, since stick in the stand, since shiny malleable metal, since rare gemstones, stone/bone/woodcarving, powder paints in caves

Cheating only applies to people who feel 'cheated' that the pedestal they've put their favorite artists on isn't quite so high now they've maybe learnt a little of their 'secret'

But it's still a matter of the artist using whatever means at their disposal to create something - be it typewriter, bits of string, a pipe with holes in it

Just because the modern computer has become ubiquitous, powerful, and within everyone's grasp doesn't necessitate an us and them attitude, use it if you feel like using it, turn it off if you don't

And, actually, delight in the fact that there are geniuses writing software that make them fun - and these nifty digital cameras and printers we all can get our greedy greasies on - you beauty!

21st Century's an Excellent Place!

I remember watching a PBS documentary about those sculptures of antiquity that represent the human anatomy in perfect verisimilitude. There it was revealed that that perfect verisimilitude was achieved by first creating a molded cast (with plaster of Paris or other) of the ideal human subject.

And I had always thought it was a strictly a chisel and a hammer affair with nothing to guide the sculptor but his mental image of the form and his hand and eye coordination.

The Greeks also removed a couple of vertebae in the sculpture to idealise the perfect human form - and it's interesting that having striven for centuries to achieve it, once they had the artists simply stopped making those kind of sculptures

The artist will use whatever tools are available to achieve his or her end. My studio mate and I have long joked that Art and Pornography are forever at the cutting edge of visual technology: perspective, engraving, etching, lithography, photography, color, film, color photography, video, the internet. It is not far from the truth. The only ones who feel cheated are those who imagine that somehow they too could paint like Vermeer if they could employ a photograph or use the right computer software (and I assure you they are sorely mistaken) and those who imagine that the difficulty of the craft is any measure of the merit of the art... as if my paintings would be any better if I tied one hand behind my back and stood on one foot.

Here I'm reminded of the humorous anecdote of old artist who who bragged to another younger artist about making everything the hard way: "I grind my own pigments and mix my own paints. I prime my canvases with real rabbit-skin glue boiled in a pot and then seven layers of lead white. I use endless layers of glazes... in the manner of the old masters... completing one painting per year. Everything I make is done the hard way." At that moment the artist's beautiful young daughter entered the room. His younger friend looked at him, smiled, and raised a quizzical eyebrow toward the old gentleman. "Yep," he replied, her too... standing up in a canoe.":ciappa:

Search engines have certainly made research easier for writers and scholars, though of course correspondents still need to travel. Cheating implies fraud, like the fictionalized memoir author who Oprah castigated after selecting him for her club. I have his name somewhere--but what most in the media won't let on, and I should not, is a great deal of journalistic pieces are bull----, even if embedded with factual accuracy. The line between the Jason Blairs and Stephen Glasses, who respectively damaged the reputations of The New York Times and The New Republic, and someone like me doing a puff piece about my failed wedding for a nationally recognized paper, isn't all that great.

Not that I ever lied, that isn't what I mean, but bias runs rampant in the Fourth Estate, and the difference between a plagiarizer creating an issue piece to make a deadline, as opposed to Kristof's biases being embedded in his columns, isn't as hard and fast as those not in the biz like to think.

Art lies, Sir Philip Sidney's famous apologia may defend the lie, but doesn't change the fact of the lie itself.

http://www.luminarium.org/renascence...s/defence.html

Creator fraud is a difference in kind, and very difficult to sort out when it succeeds. Blaming the tools, however, is bogus.