The Online Photographer

I told my niece yesterday that the problem with my life during the pandemic is that every day is pretty much like every other day. Then I reflected that most of the excitement in the world is the wrong kind of excitement, so I oughtn't complain. Here in the USA, we have to get through Wednesday. Everything lately seems to be a question of getting through something.

Idle diversion: what do you think was the greatest artistic accomplishment of the 20th century? In any art. Define it however you'd like.

I think that the grander an idle question is, the less important the answer may be. Which is the opposite of what you'd expect; but, really, it's more important to decide what the best 35mm lens is than it is to decide what's the best religion, or who was the greatest world leader, or other large issues like that. The smaller the bite, the better it can be chewed. So have a little fun with this question if it inspires thought; but don't fret or stress about it otherwise.

I have my answer in mind but I want to see if anyone else comes up with it, which would show I'm not crazy.

Hang in there,

Mike

Book o' This Week:

Peter Lindbergh On Fashion Photography, with text in English, French, and German. Original coffee table version or small 40th Anniversary version, take your pick. Both are hardcovers. The links above will spirit you away to Amazon.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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I'm not going to "feature" any answers to my idle question because it's easy to read through all of them and so many are interesting, thoughtful, thought-provoking, or inventive, or function as leads (I had never heard of Joaquin Sorolla). The Sydney Opera House received two votes, and so did Star Wars, and so did the Pale Blue Dot. To see all the comments, click "Comments" in the post footer, or click on the post title and scroll down.

I was going to nominate "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the 1967 album by the Beatles. It seems to me that music rose to the forefront of culture for a brief time—just a couple of decades, maybe less—as it had done in Europe in the classical period of classical music (from Haydn through Schubert), or as theater rose to the peak of culture in Elizabethan England. During that time, music drove culture and also reflected it; the popular and the esoteric merged; and it was the focus of a great many young peoples' enthusiasm and ambition. The Beatles were the brief flowering of the period's most remarkable achievement in so many ways, the equivalent of Shakespeare when English theater had its cultural moment. They began as a mere "boy band" not dissimilar to 'N Sync or the Backstreet Boys, a form of adolescent "lekking" of no more significance than any transient teen heartthrob, then improbably rose to embody and define a new kind of art music. In 1967 their every artistic move arguably held the entire public in the English-speaking world spellbound. Positive or negative, everyone had an opinion about what they did. Their cross-combining of genres was new and vigorous, and they had just the right producer—a former impresario of comedy and novelty records—and he and the band essentially bridge the gap between a documentary style of recording live music to a new form of musical creation that involved the creative manipulation of the means of recording. The Beatles embodied and defined what a rock and roll band could and should be—its components, its gestures, its career arc—during the center of the music's most charged cultural moment, and both influenced and transcended it for the rest of the 20th century, until it reached its swan song in '90s grunge and "alternative."

And "Sgt. Pepper's" was the band's masterpiece, and includes its most transcendent psychedelic song. The album functions more like a integrated song-cycle which, along with a few handfuls of others, defines the 12-inch album—the vinyl record together with its packaging—as a medium of pop art.

However, my answer isn't any better than anyone else's. I can certainly see the argument for Duchamp, proposed by Cecelia and seconded by Kenneth Tanaka. So maybe he gets the palm.

My only problem with that proposition is that you have to understand his accomplishment as being his influence, because his art isn't well known to the public and never was. Ask the average man or woman on the street who Marcel Duchamp was and I'll bet only a minority will say "artist." (Some will say "mime," I bet, ha ha.)  I did say you should define "accomplishment" however you wanted to, though. And influence is an accomplishment.

In my understanding I group Duchamp with a number of disparate influences that redefined visual art at a further distance from photography, which had effortlessly appropriated figurative representation in a way that art could never hope to match. (Photography didn't kill painting but it sure killed Trompe-l'œil and fastidious history painting as practiced by, say, Ernest Meissonier.) The project was to preserve the status and prestige of visual art...and the aristocracy's interest in the project was to preserve the monetary value of art's physical artifacts. The way I see it, Picasso's significance was that he recast the whole history of art to emphasize its non-representational aspects; Duchamp's significance was as an ideological counterpart. (They were more or less exact contemporaries, although Picasso's lifespan was longer.) They can both be understood as part of the same project, in my view.

But maybe that's unfair to them. To see the art of the 20th century in the context of its relationship to photography, as I do, is a minority view, idiosyncratic, perhaps eccentric. 

But if you're going to say Duchamp, shouldn't you also include Warhol? Aren't the two of them the twin poles of the idea that "art doesn't exist unless I say it does"? I'm just sayin'.   :-)

And now, time for me breakfast.