>>4036257So with this line of thinking it is the product that is the art, not the idea. However, going on your previous post, you say the creation of the scene is art, which is very clearly a contradiction. If I said to you that I angled some cups in some way that was visually interesting, but didn't paint or photograph it, well then obviously I have not created any art just by telling you about what I had seen. However, if I arranged these cups and did some very poor, 2nd grader-tier crayon drawing of their placement, would that be the same as me creating an intricate, representative oil painting of these cups? I'm going to take the liberty of assuming you would say that the oil painting is of a much higher artistic level than the crayons, and in that assumption we find that the art form is the quality of use of the medium, not necessarily what the medium is depicting. The same must follow for other kinds of painting, pencil sketches, clay modelling, and any other form of visual art, so why not photography? The painter must know how to use his brushes, the sketcher his pencils, and the sculptor must know how to use whatever tools are at his disposal. And as a photographer one must know how to use lighting, settings on a camera, lenses, etcetera. And as well as that, in an age where cameras are most often automated, to be a good/notable photographer now almost requires that the photo be visually interesting, where the painter can make up for poorer composition in pure level of detail. In that, I think one can respect the mind of the photographer more than his hands, the painter the other way around, unless of course the painter has really good composition. :)
