"The Darkest corners of both Hemispheres of the Brain"....
Jack,
I pondered the same question as I read the recent posts. Photography consists of elements that can involve the darkest corners of both hemispheres of the brain, and that might be large part if its broad appeal.
Tom,
I think you have expressed, perhaps accidentally, maybe by intent, my view of art. First it can recruit anything good or bad to give that creative concept and then it's made in a mechanical or material form as a kind of performance for the exterior world of the rest of us. Maybe there's a message to transfer, or it's just entertainent or a scaffolding for our wandering, musing, lust, resentment or even a call to action.
Art, coming from even the darkest corners of our minds and looked at from that space too, has a wide form of intent, being and then changes as we change. Here, each of us so different, that we can appreciate the same thing is still remarkable and shows we must have lots of values wired in us at birth.
The rest is overlapping cultures and spheres of knowledge and experience. That's why I get to learn a lot and enjoy what we cannot or did not do ourselves. Art essentially allows us to make living robots that go about expressing or eliciting sentiments in and across our communities.
"Pixel Peeping", Design Acceptance and Critique: Some, like detectives examining bullets for the marks of a particular barrel, try to deconstruct someone's evil art,
the murder, if we may call it
"art". We do that ourselves, looking at the brush strokes of Van Gogh or the faces of Michelangelo, reflecting, perhaps his own face from the mirror. Eventually we know the scheme of each person's
oeovre,
(look it up) and so just spend little time any more on the technicals. At that stage we "know" the family of work, (from which the art comes) and straight off are primed to "like" or "dislike" what's before us. Until then, we might use technical minutiae to kind of protect us from the embarassment of welcoming in our midst "fraud" masquerading as a photograph worthy of our praise.
Asher