culverwood wrote:We are getting off topic but it may surprise you to know that many sculptures are subcontracted by the sculptor to manufacturers more capable of casting bronze or working with steel, large sculptures such as the Angel of the North could not be made by one man beavering away with a hammer and chisel in his studio. Laser cutting and other modern techniques are a fundamental part of most new large sculptures.
In a similar note do you regard photographic art as art, perhaps not.
This is not new and just as artists such as Leonardo worked in the studio of his master he also employed people to work in his studio when he was established.
Yes well, a long way off-piste and into an area in which you most certainly know much, much more than I
. However, I inferred from your first post on sculptures that you were commissioning something on a small scale; hence my response. So far as the Angel of the North is concerned, maybe it is at least as much a feat of artistic engineering as a work of art: in conception and design it is wholly a work of art but in construction it is almost entirely (if not quite entirely), a feat of engineering. The artist is, presumably, redundant by the time that the construction begins.
Personally, I regard photography as an artistic application of an instrument. The composition of the picture is artistic but the capturing of the image is instrumental (whether mechanical or electronic). It is impossible to say that photography is not an art just because an instrument is involved, because the instrument is absolutely essential to the pursuit of photography.
Making clothes is a skilled trade of human brain, hand and eye, in which an understanding of physical form, space and movement, in a scientific sense, is wedded to an artistic appreciation of proportion, sense of becoming (to the eventual owner of the garment) and balance, to execute a practical and well-looking product, which fits. Making clothes is (obviously) possible without the intervention of machines - but they make the process more cost-effective for the producer. If the intervention of the machines occurs at some remove from the initial measuring and pattern-making then, arguably, the process of true bespoke clothes-making is interrupted as the use of human brain, hand and eye have been excluded from a significant part of the process. I do not know whether it is still true but Rolls Royce radiator grills were always (proudly) made by the grill makers
without the use of any measuring instruments.
Maybe, the true secret of every skilled tradesman's calling lies in that fact. Other examples are: the cabinet maker who can cut square in the dark with a handsaw; the joiner who can make an internal step joint to take account of inconveniently knotted wood (if there is any joiner left in the whole world who can still make an internal step joint), and the ironsmith who can make complex
wrought iron (no machine could ever do that unless a computer can be brought forth that knows how to use the anvil, the bellows and the hammer).
Now, of course, there are computerized machines which can even produce foot-moulds which can be used as shoe lasts but, since shoe lasts are never exactly the same as the foot inside, there is no potential in the computerized versions for the exercise of the human judgement that will go into making a shoe last that takes account of all the various peculiarities of the human foot - from arthritic joints, through fallen arches and incipient bunions, and on to hammer toes! The same thing seems to go for assymetrical shoulders - see the post above in which the computer took five attempts to find the fit (one wonders what the actual cutter of the original pattern was doing during this process).
For these reasons, I am far from convinced that creeping mechanization is a way to preserve the
truth of bespoke cutting and fitting.
But, hell, except in principle, it doesn't really affect me anymore
.
NJS
Point, game, match... 