" Untitled"
Art as Discovery by John Hughson

Famous Art Pranks:

Pierre Brassau, Monkey Artist Date: February 1964

Four paintings by a previously unknown avant-garde French artist named Pierre Brassau were exhibited at an art show in Goteborg, Sweden. Art critics from Swedish papers praised the works. For instance, Rolf Anderberg of the morning Posten wrote: "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer."

However, one critic panned Brassau's work, suggesting that "Only an ape could have done this." As it turned out, the latter critic was correct. Pierre Brassau was, in fact, an ape. Specifically, he was a four-year-old West African chimpanzee named Peter from Sweden's Boras zoo.

Ghost Artists Date: February 1952

A small ad ran on the theatrical page of the Washington Post offering the services of a company of “ghost artists”: “Too busy to paint? Call on the Ghost Artists? We paint it, you sign it.”

The idea of ghost artists caught the interest of the media, and a report about the company went out over the wire services and appeared in newspapers nationwide. The ghost artists were said to be earning lucrative fees from executives who wanted to impress their friends. Satisfied clients included military men, government officials, doctors, businessmen, and a Wall Street broker who commissioned an entire exhibition in order to break into “arty circles.”

The Washington Post devoted an editorial to the organization, concluding, “After some reflection, we can't see anything morally amiss about this proposal....”

Not all were impressed by the concept. One correspondent to the Post's Letters to the Editor declared, “This is a sad commentary indeed on the manners and mores of the Nation's Capital.” The ad was later determined to be a hoax.

The Disumbrationist School of Art Date: 1924

Paul Jordan Smith, a Los Angeles-based novelist and Latin scholar, painted a blurry picture of a South Seas islander holding a banana over her head. He intended the picture as a spoof of abstract styles of modern art such as Cubism, and as a joke he entered it into an art exhibition. He claimed it was the work of the Russian artist Pavel Jerdanowitch (a name he had invented), the founder of the Disumbrationist School of Art (another invention of his).

Smith titled his painting 'Exaltation' and wrote that it represented the shattering of the bonds of womanhood.

To his chagrin, but not really to his surprise, the work was praised by critics. Smith finally tired of the deception exposed the true identity of Jerdanowitch to the Los Angeles Times. Along with the unmasking he delivered a lecture about the declining standards of taste in the artistic community.

Source: Alex Boese and the Museum of Hoaxes

"Graffitipow "
by H. Gay Allen

Catching the Light by Jerry Lodriguss
The Ethics of Digital Manipulation -- Is it real, or is it Photoshop?
How can we believe anything we see anymore? With today's technology, we can literally do anything we want with images. But let us not forget, fake and manipulated photographs - visual fiction - began circulating not long after the inception of photography.

Ethics and Aesthetics
When we correct, manipulate and enhance images, we must deal with questions of both ethics and aesthetics. This discussion is not only limited to digital manipulation, but also includes conventional darkroom methods. Ethics are a set of rules that we invent that define what we think is good and bad. The dictionary says ethics are "a set of moral principles or values" and that ethical means "conforming to accepted professional standards of conduct".

Aesthetics, on the other hand, deal with the nature of beauty, art and taste, and things that are pleasing in appearance. With digital processing, there is almost no limit to what can be done to an image, and many things are done to images with the best intentions. The question is, when does the pursuit of aesthetics violate our ethics?

Changes can be made to images that are undetectable, so much so that there is now discussion that photographs will no longer be allowed as evidence in courts of law. In this discussion, there will be no simple black and white answers, everything will fall along a continuum and it is humans who decide the rules for what is considered ethical behavior and these rules can and do change over time.

The Myths of Objective Reality and Absolute Truth
The fundamental fact that we usually forget is that when we take a picture we do not make a perfectly objective recording of reality. What we make is an interpretation of reality.

Another problem in the "accurate" recording of nature is inherent in the choice of technology used by a photographer. Do you prefer Kodachrome of Velvia color film? Take your pick. Which particular Canon digital picture style do you like: Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful, or Monochrome? Which is a "true" recording of nature? None of these are. Each is an interpretation of nature. There is no film or digital camera that perfectly and accurately records nature even on this simple level.

Interpretations
Photographers interpret what they see in a myriad of ways. The choice of lens by focal length and working f/stop alter spatial relationships between objects in the frame. The choice of location and focal length changes the very content of the picture. The choice of when to trip the shutter freezes a particular moment in a fluid and continuously changing time stream.

The real world is not recorded with strict objectivity in photographs because they are taken by human photographers who exercise editorial judgments in the taking of the photo, which includes the personal preferences, aesthetics, prejudices, intentions and philosophies of the photographer who takes the image.

Ethical Limits
How much is too much, how far is too far? The simple answer is, that it depends on what you are trying to do. If I enhance faint detail found in an original image to make it more visible, or more aesthetically appealing, that is ethically acceptable to me. Some would disagree.

If you add something that wasn't there in the original scene, you've crossed the line from a documentary art form into a fictional one. This may or may not be OK, depending on what your purpose is. If your purpose is to portray a scene as truthful, then it's not OK. If your purpose was to create fiction, or "art", then it is OK. You just have to be up front and tell the viewer what you are doing in either case.

Purposes and intentions
The important questions when we manipulate an image are, why are we doing this, and what are our purposes and intentions? Where do we draw the line? What is ethical in the digital manipulation and enhancement of a photo?

To answer these questions we must consider why we took the picture and what we are going to do with it. If the picture is taken for artistic purposes only, then pretty much anything goes because only aesthetic considerations come into play. If the photo was taken for documentary or journalistic reasons, then another set of ethical considerations come into play that have been developed by the photographer and the viewers of the image.

My personal opinion is that the answer hovers somewhere around the line that gets crossed when the manipulation is done with the intent to deceive the viewer.
Continued next column

"Painted Art"
by Kustokusto

Do The Tools Make A Difference?
We start out with nature. We can only observe it intimately with our own senses. Some might argue that a perfect experience can only be a first person experience. But if we find something interesting or beautiful, we may want to share something of that experience with others.

If others are not there with us to view the original scene personally, we can only share our own interpretation of the original experience. And we can only share this experience through some other media than reality. It may be verbal, through an oral story that tells of what we experienced, or it may be written down in words. It may be through some technology such as a simple drawing with pencil and paper, or a more complex technology such as film, CCD imaging or video.

The tool or technology does not really matter. Do you really care whether Hemingway wrote with a pen and paper or a typewriter? What matters is what the artist does with the tool or technology. Is he true to the subject and reality as he sees it? Is it the tool, or the user of the tool, that the viewer trusts? The viewer must trust the creator of the work. The artist's credibility is the only commodity of value that he has to exchange with the viewer for their trust.

The Bottom Line
If an artist painted an entire picture from a photograph, would this be unethical? Only if he tried to misrepresent what it was and how he did it. If the creator was honest about exactly what was done, then the viewer could make his own judgment.

Final Thoughts
What is important is our motivation. Why are we doing these things? Are we doing them to deceive people? No, most of us are not. We are doing it to make the subject more visually interesting. We are simply trying to make it a better picture. Just as a writer enhances his factual stories with metaphor and adjectives, photographers can enhance their images with digital techniques such as contrast and color enhancement. Writers massage the language of words; photographers massage the language of light.

Source: Jerry Lodriguss; Astropix

This page posted August 16 2010
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