Za's

If you haven't noticed, I like going out to eat. I've looked at these pictures on the wall at Za's for a couple years now but now with this assignment I actually looked at them with design elements in mind this time around. Both pictures (the third picture is a close up of the second) hint the subject matter without nailing it to the ground with detail-which reminds me of the early modern movement, when artists strived to get a point across as quickly and non-frivolously as possible. The flat planes of color of the first reminds me of Toulouse Latrec's work; the second is almost an impressionist approach landscape depiction (from afar you know exactly what you are looking at but up close it is a mix of splotches and lines of color-not a whole lot of extra sharpness or detail). Anyway, in class we are talking a lot about how the need for realistic depiction of subject matter has gone by the wayside in the twentieth century because of serious social reasons, and here I was looking at these pictures, thinking how we take for granted the immense change that took place in art and how now we don't think anything of an ambiguous or abstract work of art. It's commonplace. I was looking at these pictures thinking of how when artists first started trying out these more abstract techniques, they were often rejected or thrown out of art school. Fast forward: photography now can use very life-like images to communicate something, so art and design are not needed for this goal. In the present, the message is more important. If an artist creates an exact copy of a subject, that's what it is considered-an exact copy, big deal. The audience then asks, so what? What's the message? What's unique? What are we to feel?