A photograph is a slippery and unstable idea — it never has only one meaning. In capturing the face of a loved one, it's a hedge against loss. As a document or a formal record, it's dependent on the political, economic and propagandist impulses of the photographer. It can provide evidence of what has been — if we understand the various institutions from which it emerges.
DANA SELF
A Long View
From Remove the price tags and take your pick
Is there a link between a painting's artistic merit and its market value? John Windsor thinks not
Here is a tick-list of criteria for commercial success: a reasonably prolific oeuvre (beans or Blochs, dealers need a constant flow of stock); membership of an art movement; recognition in art history; artwork in public galleries; backing from powerful collectors such as Charles Saatchi. One might add: high quality art. But the market does not judge art; it merely rides the reputation merry-go-round. Good art is art that sells.
Certianly the most succint expalnation of market forces and teh quality of art.
Mindy McAdams reports on an interview with Rob Finch of A photo a day and she quotes him:
There are two specific camps of people in our still picture world. There are people who love photography and there are people who love to tell stories. People who love photography only for the act of photography might have some trouble in the future assuming they want to work at a media outlet.
I think that photography by its own nature is very "elastic" in practice. For image driven news media that elastcity is an opportunity to diversify the use of photography. The challenge is being very transparent about what is illustrative and what is documentary.
Much has been said how the new digital technologies are rehaping the face of news gathering, presentation and distribution.
In Doom and gloom for photojournalism? Mindy McAdams discusses a slideshow from Yahoo! News -- In the Wake of the Coup -- is wholly composed of photos from Flickr.
Reports of the death of painting, however, were an exaggeration. Painting did not die, but it was certainly transformed. You might think of the work of Jackson Pollack and react with distaste and displeasure (if abstraction offends you, that is); you might also think of Picasso, De Chirico, Magritte, or Cézanne. I'm not attempting an art lesson but rather advancing the idea that change is not bad, and what might seem to be a death in one person's view might be a rebirth in someone else's eyes.I'm not ready to acknowledge the death of photojournalism -- but I am scanning the horizon for signs of its new forms.
A dying breed..(paid) movie critics
Orlando Sentinel Communications
The movie-obsessed have migrated to the Internet, where ethics can lead to co-opted opinions, phony "buzz" and bought-and-paid-for exposure. Are these honest opinions, are have the studios finally gotten their fondest wish, turning reviewing into just part of their PR machine?And career-wise, the fickle nature of the Net means that sites come in and out of style. How can you build a living out of that, unless you live in your mom's basement? The ones drawing traffic and turning profits today will be old news and off your "favorites" list faster than you can say "Whatever happened to Borat?" or "Ain't it what news?"
Ironically enough, posted to Sentinal Movies Blog.
When worlds collide
From Publishing 2.0
The widely-used and much reviled term “user-generated content” implies that somebody is making something. But the dirty little secret of “user-generated” sites like YouTube and MySpace is that much of the content is not made by the users themselves — it’s appropriated from someone else.
At the end of the day, whenever anybody uploads or posts something to the web, it’s just a form of publishing. What’s radical about the new digital reality is that I can publish anything that I made — and I can publish anything that anybody else made.
Basic common sense tells you that if I were to take all of the content from another blog, publish it here, and then run ads against it, that would be wrong. Much of the tangled web we now face results from the euphemistic obfuscation of terms like “user-generated content.” If we call it what it is — for example, people streaming music from their MySpace pages while MySpace runs ads on those pages — then we can have a clear debate about the right and wrong of it.
In a great tradiion, MySpace and You Tube is the home of appropriation art. In that sense we have contemporary and modern traditions that as Wiikipedia says of Duchamp: "Duchamp's "creativity" as an artist lies in the gesture of selecting the urinal as an art piece and displaying it in an artistic context." So MySpace and You Tube "artists", if they can prove the transformative nature the "long tail" on the appropriated work on their page they can sit at ease. .
From Clickz
The photo-sharing site integrates video-sharing functionality, and releases plans for Project Spotlight, where it will foster independent video.
Just as I suggested herefor Yahoo!...
I am a pretty involved user of Flickr. Why doesn't Yahoo! direct Flickr to throw the video upoad switch and move the game to their court when it comes to user contributed video. Flickr has a community aeshetic for a genre of photography mostly banal and snapshot oriented. There are still enough digital image makes to move Yahoo to the head of the pack.
Why isn't Flickr doing this for Yahoo?
Hindsight, foresight, microblindness
Marketing In The Era Of Overwhelming Choice
If too much choice is a problem for consumers, it is a catastrophe for marketers. Why? Because consumers have adopted a very useful coping strategy for the tyranny of too much: they ignore most of what they see. When overloaded with choice, they buy brands they know and trust, or they don't buy at all.
So how can business leaders address the needs of choice-stressed consumers?
Companies must take responsibility for making decisions on behalf of their customers, something we call strategic clarity.
Less choice creates more value in the tyranny of too much.