Category: A Symbol Life

How Groups Grow

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, art biz, Criticism, dye transfer2 Comments

learning means doing.

Two groups; both about dye transfer, imbibition printing — that stuff value formed from mythic difficulty, and quite a bit of obscurity.

One group supports each other.

The other group gossips.

  • the new group. smaller. more engaged
  • the old group. hoping for recovery

The older group is the one inherited from the Jim Browning Yahoo group. At one time it held possible growth. There were fans, fanatics and some accomplished practitioners. It was steeped in conservative aesthetics. that of an industrial age. steeped in Kodakery. Over time, it ossified; became pedantic or pedestrian. And died. No hope. It was revived, but not revitalized by an earnest but ineffective dabbler. He fell into the same trap as all fall. Aiming to get it all. He hasn’t gotten anything. Okay, he has Ctein’s newsletter as a regular post. This consists of “what I’m selling this month” to eat.

The other group is much smaller but has criteria for membership. You must be printing. You must not be boring. You are probably younger and practicing wider imagery. If anything, this was always the way imbibition printing was grown in the last century. Kodak never understood that. Frank and crew were too slow to learn that the Klutes had the clue.

Finding Others

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, art stuff, artgame, minimum daily requirement, visual mind

People have always formed groups. We begin because of that. Life is a result of combination. Civilization is the telling of those gatherings using forms carried by those groups.

How do you find interesting others? Art school is a major place; common ground. A distinction is made between those who went to art school and those who didn’t. Schools are ranked, somewhat, by faculty value in the artworld. Art schools came of age after the general revival of college in the 50s was followed upon by the college student gap of the 60s. This was the culture gap. Between the Greatest Generation and their children the Boomer Generation.

Fear not, the Boomers lost. 1968 broke that bubble.

How do I look for artists? I look at art schools. The web takes me there. I also look at the art world. The web takes me to the gallery schemes. Quite easy to find something like this:

this is after looking at one of these people’s webpage. they listed galleries with their work.

this is, to my eye, a wide range group. That fact makes it a good jump point to current artworld view of photography art.

this isn’t a wide enough age range to be useful for advanced research. You won’t find the edge, not the direction of the photography world. You won’t find that on the established gallery pages.

to find the future, you have to hunt much harder. commerce is about the past, not the future.

commerce hates risk,