On Classification
There’s some romanticism among instagrammers and other beginner photographers against classification of their photos (even though they are using #streetphotography #poorkid and tagging everything out there to get featured, that’s a topic for another day).
But let’s check the fundamental question, should art be classified? I can’t understand why this should even be a question, why should it not be classified? Throughout art history… in fact art history itself is the history of classification of art. Classification helps discussion, pursuit and advancement of art. Music, Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, etc are not interchangeable, one can’t go to Vatican and sell them music while they need the walls painted. One can’t paint Abstract Expressionism by studying Baroque paintings.
One can photograph what they like, but the outcome is bound to get classified whether one likes it or not, classification is a natural and essential process of comprehension, unless the art is incomprehensible, which social media is full of and clarifies the reason behind our phobia of being classified, that it may fall under the classification named “shit”.
Instead, we should be open to being classified as shit, so that we get an honest opinion to improve upon and stop behaving like self proclaimed artists. Most people calling themselves artists are just engineers, mass manufacturing things they see trending on social media. I am an engineer by profession and I know only the first prototype is good, the mass manufactured samples keep getting worse and worse as they are made by machines without thoughts. We can try improving the prototypes instead by putting in our own thoughts. Being just an unclassified artist is not going to make it something great. Having a paint brush in hand doesn’t make one artist, even the guy painting vehicle number plates has paint brush. He mass produces number plates, he is an engineer (no offense to engineers, I am one, mass production has its role, a big role, may be bigger than artists). But it’s disgusting to see engineers justifying mass production defects as art.
If we seriously want to improve, we need to study the classifications we already fall into, explore the depths and add our own ideas to make something that’s not superficial. It’s even fine to be superficial as long as we don’t claim to be some great artist and are honest about it. But if we want to make anything meaningful, meaningful even to ourselves, we need to be honest about it.
Footnote: The image used in the post is Judith Beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio