Mind Set! by John Naisbitt

Author:John Naisbitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.

DIANE ARBUS, 1923–1971

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) called her “one of the most original and influential artists in the 20th century.” From March to May 2005 the museum ran the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations.

In what is known as the classic photography market, a Diane Arbus print of “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey” recently sold for $478,400 at a Sotheby’s auction. Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Calla Lily, 1986,” sold for $242,700 at the same auction. Six-figure prices have become routine. In 1999 Man Ray’s “Glass Tears” (one of six known prints) sold for $1.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a photograph (so far). Digital photography, with which you can outrageously manipulate images, has made the old, classic photographs seem more authentic and valuable. But now there is a big market for digital photographs. A huge, digitally manipulated 1997 photograph by Andreas Gursky recently sold for $613,000, a record for any contemporary photographer.

But photography has had a hard time being recognized by MoMA. When Alfred Barr set up MoMA in 1929, he made architecture and photography foundations of our visual arts culture, explicit participants in the museum. In 2004 the museum put on a fashion photography show and in doing so congratulated itself on presenting the first major fashion photography show. The self-congratulations rang a little hollow. The show, called Fashioning Fiction, turned out to be as boring and pretentious as installations and videos and certainly arrived a little late, considering that for the last couple of decades MoMA and other museums have presented “contemporary art” shows consisting of vapid installations and boring video pieces, all of questionable artistic merit. But it is a beginning, although someone said that if MoMA hadn’t been temporarily located in Queens (while its Manhattan headquarters were being redesigned), the show never would have happened.

On February 14, 2006, at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City, a 1904 photograph was sold for $2.92 million, the world record for any photograph for any period. It was “The Pond, Moonlight” by Edward Steichen, the first of the twentieth-century giants in American photography. Such a price underscores at least a subliminal understanding that we are living in a pictorial world.

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