What? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills over here, how is photography DYING because of the smartphone? It would not surprise me if there's more fantastic photography being created in 2023 than in any previous year, and I say this as someone who will let go of my fully manual 50 when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
I think it's a pretty basic law of supply and demand: increase supply and value goes down. Sure, there's lots of "good" (mostly AI assisted) photography, and its value is mostly worthless.
Take Instagram for instance. If you use it, do you even remember a photograph you've seen in the last month? Things are so ephemeral now. Most things are not worth remembering.
>I think it's a pretty basic law of supply and demand: increase supply and value goes down.
Aren't you assuming photos are fungible? Smartphones have made "snapshot" photography more accessible than ever, and killed the basic 35mm camera market, sure. But most people never paid for anyone else's photos anyway, and they weren't going to start now. With exception of weddings.
There are a ton more photos taken now than there were pre-digital days, but as far as I can see the market for photos-as-art seems about the same as it was. This of course makes them a much smaller percentage of all photos taken, but most photos taken have a marginal value of zero anyway, always have (at least on an open market, where sentimental value isn't valued).
So, you're saying that "the value of art" is reducible to the economics of the price you can get someone to pay for it in a capitalistic marketplace?
I'm sure glad that there was sufficient demand for the 10,000-year-old cave paintings we still have access to when they were first made, so that the original artists had an incentive to create them.
Truly, what makes them so valuable as works of art today, is the lack of supply of new ones.
By "value" I mean "the nebulous value we as a species derive from art" not necessarily economic value.
Regarding cave paintings: You couldn't make new cave paintings even if you wanted to. We don't value the lines on the cave wall. We value the leap in human cognition. We value the evidence that humans advanced from the primitive animal mind to become an abstract thinker. And, based on how things have developed, I think we can conclude thinking symbolically and in the abstract was a pretty good idea! It's likely that contemporaries to cave painters had their minds absolutely blown by the first use of symbols. Cave paintings are high values now, but were probably also high value when they were created.
> By "value" I mean "the nebulous value we as a species derive from art" not necessarily economic value.
Huh. Because "a pretty basic law of supply and demand" sure sounds to me like you were talking about the value of market economics 101, and not that other thing.
