The world of photography has been in the grips of, in John Durniak's words (NY Times photo editor in the 60's and 70's) of the POB's (print oriented bastards). We are a culture that looks at art as literature (the first time I heard someone talk about "reading" a photograph I got real nervous). Images don't tell stories. They can't speak, and unless they are strung out in a series, nothing like a sentence is formed. Movies tell stories, captions tell stories, stories tell stories.
Renoir was once asked what theories he worked from as an artist. His answer was that he painted first and came up with the theories after. He also cautioned artists not to be afraid of making a pretty picture. Hindemith, the serial composer, also said that there was still a lot of beautiful music to be written in C Major.
Along with the POB's there is a sizable crowd of theory oriented bastards - who use painfully complex, artificially constructed recursive criticism to dictate to artists what they should be doing, or what they have done.
I had a friend, an extremely talented photographer, who went through Art School, and came out not knowing an F stop from an pit stop, and was running around (this happened during the era of "appropriation") re-photographing her own work, other people's work, could quote Heidegger real well, had read reams of criticism, and even criticism of the original criticism, but had lost her wonderful originality in the process.
Kenneth Tynan once said that critics were like eunuchs in a whorehouse, absolute experts on something they could never hope to do themselves.
ee cummings once wrote "To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing it's best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting."
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