A Half-Arted Attempt

I've just logged on, smoking from a heated debate with Beth, who was plucking high-brows and picking fights on, of all subjects, art, which like personal hygiene and being nice, is clearly not her forte. I'm just kidding; Beth is pretty nice and smells good for most of the time, but has a leaning towards the odd absurd opinion, especially concerning art...

Tonight I noticed how the tulips on my window were looking a little worse for wear. Not a regular flower keeper I'd forgotten to water them. In fact, I didn't even realise you had to - I thought they'd take care of it themselves - and so the tulips were clearly on their way out, on their death flower bed, if you will. Anyway, I gave them water, shone my desk lamp on them and performed the CPR I learned from Baywatch but nothing would revive the purple pretties.

So I decided to take some photos and document their final hours, much like I suppose, The Passion of the Tulips. That's not to compare my flowers to Jesus, although the poinsettia and palm leaf have both enjoyed connotations of the Christ. Right, I better avoid any further charges of blasphemy and get back to my point.

Preparing for the shoot, I arranged the flowers against the glass of the window, which was decorated with raindrops illuminated by the street light. I positioned a lamp beneath the flowers, adjusted my camera accordingly and - content with my composition - began to take photographs.

"Why don't you do some real art?" Beth asked.

To which I countered, "And what is real art?"

"You know, with pencils and stuff," she replied. "Like the stuff you did in Paris, or the nude...or those skulls you painted."

I asked her if she thought photography was art, to which she replied "yes", alluded to Ansel Adams and suggested that time in setting up a shoot was necessarily a requirement of good art. "You can't just take pictures of stuff. Nature is the art in your pictures." And then her most damning accusation. "You're plagiarising God!"

Landscape photography was naturally a point of contention then for Beth and something she's termed, "half-art". Turning her scorn now to Ansel Adams, she continued. "God's already done the art for you. You just have to snap and it looks good."

So, you could say, I snapped - and showed her the photos I had taken. These, Beth said, were "art-y. Not art but like art," which I'm not sure is better than the "half-art" of Ansel Adams, et al., but I'll let you decide.

Please post your comments and let us know what you think of my photos, poor Ansel's and of what makes 'real' art.