Posted October 27, 2009 at 10:30pm
Posted October 27, 2009 at 11:40am
Posted October 22, 2009 at 2:41pm
Khuong Nguyen for Amusement Magazine
It is maybe because photography has been misused such a lot that I think you have to be very careful when you’re looking at a photograph. You always have to know the conditions under which it has been made - because otherwise you cannot read it, or you could misunderstand it, or the image can be misused. Since photography is such a realistic medium, it pretends that everything you’re looking at was in front of the camera. But in the meantime it wasn’t. I think it was once said that “The illiterate of the future is not the person who cannot read, but the one who cannot read photographs properly.
Posted October 22, 2009 at 11:02am
The paradox and contradiction that is made apparent by these anecdotes defines much of the art of the last 50 years; art that has found itself by questioning authorship, authenticity and identity. It’s a questioning that ranges across many issues: the authority and meaning of the signature; the use of found source material as copy or theft; the adoption of a strategy of simulation within the conception of the work; a re-questioning in those terms of the status and usefulness of the Duchampian readymade that itself refers directly, through the act of nomination, to the role of the signature; the definition of the copy in terms of the relationship to a primary source that has been lifted to new use, the repetition of such an act, or even the representation of the act of repetition as a form of copy.
— from “‘This is Not By Me’: Andy Warhol and the Question of Authorship” by Andrew Wilson (via string)
