Ok some questions then ...
where isn't the art ? Uta Barth or Andreas Gursky or David Batchelor aren't producing art?
What criteria are being used to measure "progress" in graphic design, film-making etc?
How do you want to measure the health or otherwise of photography? Would we want to measure it by the same criteria as oil painting? acrylic painting? concrete scuplture? Literature? TV?
If we "liberate photography from the photograph" does it remain photography? If I liberate omelette from eggs (perhaps I make it using dogmeat) does it remain an omelette , an evolved omelette or not an omelette at all?
I'm not saying this doesn't warrant discussion, far from it ... but this is complicated stuff, and warrants a more sophisticated and better informed approach than Mr. Colberg has applied in his short article.
Oh I completely agree. It addresses an idea far outside the scope of a small blog post.
What is art and what isn't is being debated quite heatedly in the courts in Britain. Maybe the court decides what is art and what isn't?
Artquest / Artlaw / Copyright / Protecting copyright / What is Sculpture?
Suddenly Banksy's graffiti, the epitome of dissent, is being protected by the Government? The government in fact hires artists to "touch up" his work attacked by his rivals!
Council adds its own touch to a Banksy - News - Evening Standard
Art it turns out, is much like a shared understanding of what is good. Much like notions of a marriage. It's seems like society wakes up, crosses a critical threshold (in empathy perhaps) and declares it as such. That, or the courts decide. We live in strange times.
I am personally not that interested in classifications or issues of identity (identity issues were what my thesis project was about many years ago) and it's a topic best left to hindsight and historians. The separation across time lends greater clarity to understand underlying structure of a linear past. We are programmed to understand and interpret symbols more easily than concepts. So the word "photography" must mean very different things to different people.
To me, for example, everything is a photograph. The surface of a piece of paper is constantly being bombarded by light and is capturing it, absorbing minute quantities of it in the process. Some minute part of the structure of all surfaces are constantly being rearranged when light hits it. Film was sensitive enough to capture the changes in light and make it visible to humans. But everything around us is taking photographs all the time. We just don't have the technology to extract information from those surfaces yet. So not only is every 'surface' a photographer, they are (it is) a far more persistent and involved a photographer than anyone with a camera. Just imagine layers upon layers of perfectly sharp full hi-definition video being captured for all time on all surfaces surrounding us.
That is as far as definitions go.
So that leaves us with the 'act' of pressing a shutter release. Which if we look at critically, in its simplest form, is a tool for communication. Communication with either one's future self, or to other people as a shared experience.