Being orange in this case, or a “tart,” or pin-up, or a cheerleader, or a waitress, or a seemingly abandoned woman in a cheerless bar – are all set ups contrived by Sherman to explore the way we read “into” who SHE is, on the basis of what’s limited to the information constructed within her frame. My guess is that she works it pretty hard… from the inside as well… to match the projection she’s mimicking for the camera.

So I suppose y’all can go to town on pythagorean proportions and such, but my guess is that she’s jerking you around a little… and you’ve swallowed the bait. If one extremely devoted sucker wants to be drowned in his or her projections to the tune of $3.4 million or so – I’d personally prefer he (or she) to drop those bucks in Haiti… and not with those folks rebuilding their resort condos.

But the critique of this particular photo also seems to fall curiously often into the “So – is photography ART?” genre of geez, that much for a PHOTO!!!! Come on people. You’re talking about art on the marketplace here… driven by market factors. I don’t understand them – why pretend to?

It is no coincidence that Brunelleschi was a notable architect and civil engineer.

Or, in another medium, consider Pythagoras’s work on harmonics

I thought the ones she chose ranged from decent at best to downright dreadful — and they certainly wouldn’t have met the “rule of thirds”! On top of that, a couple were technically challenged, to put it charitably.

But when she finally set about to arrange the final prints, I realized that she had found some commonalities between sets of 2-3 photos that brought out elements even I, nominally the photographer, hadn’t seen — probably because I could only see them in the context I had originally snapped them, whereas the collector saw them in the context of imperfect photos grouped according to some themes that only came out when you placed them side by side, but otherwise isolated.

Were my photographs “art”? Certainly not. But nevertheless she found something that spoke to her in them, and felt compelled enough to buy them. No accounting for taste.

And there’s this caution: Frustrated lesser talents in the arts will often turn for relief to a quantifiable technical aspect of art at which they can excel. They become expert in a small corner–be it color and design or anatomy or materials, etc.–and then insist that it’s the whole game. As teachers, their natural enemy is the truly gifted. None of this raises art.

But even if such prescriptivism is a total mistake, it seems like the last vice that contemporary art is in danger of lapsing into. In fact, much of what’s wrong with current efforts stems from an inordinate aversion to it. At this point, even a little erring in Carter’s direction would be more salutary than our reflexive erring away from it.

I’m not really defending Cindy Sherman, you know. I’ll take Joel Sternfeld instead. Or William Eggleston.

The sort of “grids” and “shop rules” that Joe Carter is citing are not sufficient to objectively qualify something as art, but are arguably necessary. Are compositional rules set in stone? No. Can they be broken? Sure they can, but not many can get away with it. Unless you’re a Durer, Turner, or Caravaggio, you’re less likely to produce “strong effects” than “poop on a canvas.”

And even by the most generous estimates, Cindy Sherman is no Durer/Turner/etc. Her foregoing of craftsmanship (even if deliberate, which I don’t buy) has earned no comparable benefit of the doubt.

There are many compositional rules that can be helpful to an artist: the rule against equal measures of light and dark, the rule against multiple points of equal interest, the rule against tangents of outline, the rule against repetition of equal intervals of space, etc. Such mistakes are like standing up in a canoe–they produce strong effects that can lead to disaster.

But a competent artist can use these strong effects to good purpose, and minimize the problems by shifts of emphasis. Many a great picture would not conform to these guidelines. So you can’t just throw a grid over a work of art to judge it. These are shop rules for artists, not judging criteria for critics.

It seems to me that the point of Cindy Sherman’s photo is precisely that weird sideways blurry ill-composed look to it. It’s a kind of anti-compositional anti-art. To throw it into a more balanced scheme would be to rob it of its intended qualities.

JAM