Skimming through here and other fora it's kind of interesting to see all the rules that are pointed to to explain why a bad photograph is bad. Rules like: she can't smile, no looking at the camera, you can't show pubic hair. OH, and it's gotta have a naked chick or two, or maybe a bodybuilding guy.

When did art begin to have these rules?

Actually art does have a few rules. A piece made to deliberately copy another piece, or to be acceptable to a specific market or critic, is called "academic art." This applies to everyone trying to shoot like Ansel Adams, or Robert Maplethorpe. Or Helmut Newton. It isn't art. But it's perfectly acceptable to be influenced by other artists. Hard to escape that.

Art also can't stray too far from the evolution of the medium. Critics don't know what to do with something that isn't a linear development.

And art has to do one of the two following things:

1) It must make a statement about the time or circumstances in which the artist lives, or;

2) It must cause a surprising aesthetic experience in the viewer, and keep her attention.

I like the second one better, personally, and it is a very loose paraphrasing of Kant. But the first is just as valid. And the only web practitioner of the first type that I'm aware of abandoned the web because no one got it.

Now when the question of porn vs. art comes up, and it inevitably does, people get their panties in a bunch explaining how their stuff is art, but if the model is smiling it's porn (I guess the Mona Lisa can go either way). Or if pubic hair or genitals are showing. As though artists for the last three thousand years haven't made those parts the subject of art, with the exception of the middle of the 20th century when only radical (read "real") artists would touch on sexuality.

I guess I've ranted enough. It just irks me a little to see all these "rules" thrown out where there shouldn't be any, while a real understanding of art is seldom seen at all.

Anyway, feel free to jump in and argue, flame, disagree, endorse, or skip to an entirely unconnected subject. That's what makes the web an interesting place.

-Don