Requiescat

You surely know Michael Reichmann's indispensable website, The Luminous Landscape. Like many other photo blogs, the Landscape recently noted the death of John Szarkowski, "The highly influential photography curator and author" whose "influence on the acceptance of photography as a mainstream art medium can not be underestimated." (Overestimated, I hope Mr R. meant to say.)

I didn't know John Szarkowsky, so will skip the perfunctory expressions of regret. I'm willing to believe he was a good man who will be missed, but I decline to miss him on the grounds that he helped win photography the Fine Arts Seal of Approval. There's something wrong with the whole idea of les beaux arts.

Mind you, I'm the worst kind of art snob myself, oohing and aahing over Rembrandt's drypoints and Bach's Musical Offering. I can recite French poetry and was once a Joycean scholar. But that's just me. The little man within, the one who turns out the refrigerator light, knows better. He knows that the finest work is what's done with no regard for how it'll look on the walls of a museum, or on a page under glass at the Morgan Library. Painters and poets and musicians weren't godlike until the Romantics deified them a few years back. They were people who made books or images or music that other people would pay to read, see or hear. They were no more self-conscious than anybody else. Then, alas, they became what Robert Crumb's song calls "fine arteests."

R. Crumb, bless him, delights the little man within. Photography does too. I know, I know: my own photography veers into pretension all the time. But the little man (my genius, in the sense that Socrates spoke of his "genius" -- an inner cricket, a shit detector, a conscience) has to sleep. Sometimes even Shakespeare took himself too seriously. (Remember Shakespeare? His plays were so lowbrow he had to give them across the river from London, next to the arena where English bulldogs fought English bulls.)

Long may photography (and comic books) thrive en narguant les académies de beaux arts. Trop souvent les musées ne sont que des mausolées, ou les Szarkowski font l'office de croque-mort.