Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007
"Still and all, why bother?
Here's my answer.
Many people need desperately
to receive this message:
I feel and think much as you do,
care about many
of the things you care about,
although most people do not care about them.
You are not alone."
—Kurt
Vonnegut
A message to bloggers, writers, artists everywhere, I think.
Vonnegut on Pictures (Timequake, 1996 via wikiquote)
If you really want to know whether your pictures are,
as you say, art or not, you must display them in a public place somewhere,
and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is
played. Let me know what happens. People capable of liking some paintings
or 
prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about
the artist. Again, the situation is social rather
than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human
beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking to you. Does he or she
have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence,
for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes? There are virtually no respected
paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise
quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath
Lascaux, France. I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious
attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the
viewer’s mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and
to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the
ball game.
Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not their pictureness. There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play-along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.
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Storytelling
How a story can be told in many different ways, similar to what we discuss
in the Intro
to Visual Communication class:
99 Ways to Tell
a Story, by Matt Madden. Another great overview of the same is Scott
McClouds'
Understanding Comics [ summary | Scott's
website ].