185A

Colour Record No. 185, Side A:

184B

Colour Record No. 184, Side B:

184A

Colour Record No. 184, Side A:

183B and photoshop (postscript)

Colour Record No. 183, Side B:

And a last point on photoshop:  Of course stuff like false advertisement and loose ethics in journalism are a different point, and aren't covered under artistic liberty/freedom of speech and expression.  They are separate problems in their own right.  All I'm saying is that photoshop itself isn't the problem, and the artists aren't the problem.  People that abuse altered images toward unethical ends are a problem (and people that read images incorrectly are a problem, which I covered in what I posted yesterday).

183A and photoshop (but)

Colour Record No. 183, Side A:

So it's true that art can affect its audience in powerful ways, and these effects can be negative.  Another example (different from the Slender Man case, which I wrote yesterday):   Goethe's Werther caused a huge wave of suicides in the style of Werther across Europe.  People dressed up the way Goethe describes Werther and everything  :)  and shot themselves the way Werther shoots himself  :(  Art is powerful.  Has always been.  Will always be.  And it should, too.

So, what about the Slender Man case?  Obviously it's a problem if twelve-year-olds start stabbing other twelve-year-olds?

Of course there's a problem.  But I the problem isn't the Slender Man, or the creator of the Slender Man, the problem is the two twelve-year-old girls who misread the Slender Man to such a drastic extent that they stabbed their classmate.

So the obvious way to address that problem would be to make sure people know how to read art.  Just like you shouldn't survey 500 people about how much two plus two is, get an average answer of 5.33, and then declare that to be the correct answer---just as you should teach them Math instead---just the same way, you shouldn't look at what the Slender Man makes people do, notice that it caused a stabbing, and say the Slender Man is somehow bad.  You should teach people how to read correctly instead.

The same goes for photoshop.  Altered images cause people in the audience to starve themselves, etc.  That is a problem.  But the problem isn't the image, the problem isn't the artist, the problem is that no one taught those particular viewers how to correctly read a picture.

So (a)  please don't go postal on photoshop, and (b)  please add more classes on art appreciation, tia

182B and photoshop (against)

Colour Record No. 182, Side B:

And today, the case against photoshop.

So let's review the Slender Man stabbing:  Last year in Wisconsin two twelve-year-old girls stabbed a third twelve-year-old girl almost to death.  The two girls who allegedly did the stabbing apparently acted in the hope that they would, as a result, become tight with the Slender Man, a fictional character.  The victim barely survived, the two accused are being tried as adults and facing up to 65 years in prison, and the creator of the fictional character apologized.

My point is this:  We of species Homo Stultus have been endowed with certain superpowers, such as those of thinking the unthinkable, of believing the unbelievable, of imagining the unimaginable.  You write a horror story with a horrifying (but fictional) protagonist, and---if you write it sufficiently well---somewhere on this planet some of us will think your story true, will believe you are writing it personally to us, will imagine it a sign.

In which event we shall, of course, follow that sign.

And visual images are, in this matter (as in many other matters), severalfold more effective than verbal images.

So if you draw a visually appealing image of a Slender Man, or---what is more common---of a slender woman, or of a man jumping off a bridge, then it's always possible  -_-  that someone somewhere might fail to realize that the image is only appealing because of the artist (i.e. because of you) and not because of the slenderness or the suicide.

And then your believers might try to manipulate their bodies---in real life---into comparable slenderness or suicide.

Since I myself have firm plans to keep using photoshop  :)  I shall stop short of demanding an injunction or anything against digital manipulation, but the above is the case against it.

Tomorrow:  The "but" blog.

182A and photoshop (for)

Colour Record No. 182, Side A:

     So digital manipulation of visual images has been facing criticism in my ethics class, so I shall blog about that this weekend.  And, because the spice lies in brevity  :)  my topics will be:  "For" today, "against" tomorrow, and "but" on Sunday.

     I draw every day, and I use digital manipulation (my current process involves Visio, then Microsoft Office Picture Manager, and then Adobe Photoshop).  In fact, there is nothing except digital "manipulation" in my drawings.  My ethics must be in the sewer or something  :(

     But of course my drawings aren't the kind of work that's under fire in ethics class.  Mine are non-representational (they are also non-narrative, but that's beside the point).  The images being discussed in class are photoshopped pictures of people.  Let's rewind to those.

     Artists have been doing that since long before photoshop:  A painter, drawing a live model who's posing for the picture, can draw a cubist portrait or a cubist nude, and that is quite definitely "manipulated" much more drastically than the average photoshopped picture of a person.  If manipulation were banned, what would remain of modern art?!

   The standard next modification is something on the following lines:  The ban against manipulation would be against images that are supposedly realistic.  Two points about this:

     1.  So, do you now have some solid, concrete, set-in-stone definition of realism?
     2.  More importantly:  Even realistic artists manipulate their images, of course!  Just one example:  Do you think Caravaggio actually had one of his models murder another for this, or did he perhaps "manipulate" as he painted?

     I'm over 250 words, so I'll just stop my "for" blog by saying that the right to digital manipulation is part of artistic liberty (which, in turn, is part of the freedom of speech and expression).

     Tomorrow:  The "against" blog.

181B

Colour Record No. 181, Side B:

181A

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180B

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180A

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179B

Colour Record No. 179, Side B:

179A

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178B

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178A

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177B

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177A

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176B

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176A

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175B

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175A

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174B

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174A

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173B

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173A

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172B

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172A

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171B

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171A

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170B

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