Apples & rotting festering Oranges

When I look at photos on Flickr I kind of laugh to myself. Not because I think myself a great photographer, I'm just not. There are some ridiculously good pictures to be found on that particular site, no doubt about it. But, for the most part, there's a lot of bullshit on there too. Some really amateur shit that other amateurs laud, leading some to have an inflated idea of their talent.

One of my contacts on there, who takes some pretty good shots, has a following of young men so enamored of her she could take a picture of a light switch, and they would fall over themselves finding new ways to compliment her brilliance, cuteness, so an so forth.

Flickr is facebook for "artsy" people who have made comapanies like Nikon, Canon, and Sony (just to name a few!) billion dollar a year outfits.

The flipside of that coin would be photo.net, where photographers of considerable talent/skill/experience/means post images that make my camera want to cry, and are, truth be told, the reason behind my mirth when I look at most (but not all) of the bullshit on Flickr, of which there are fucking terabytes.

Recently however, Flickr has introduced the "pro" feature. Now, one has to pay for this feature, and what it allows you to do is to fill their servers with your reatarded pictures of your own hand, or tree branches, or self portraits of you in the mirror with a camera stuck to your face, or whatever your "creative" little brain has decided would look good on the internet.

Thank god for this feature because it means I can continue to not pay for the service that is being given to me free of charge. Why would I need to post more than the 250 picture cap they put on non-subscribers like me? Some people have literally thousands of pictures on their account. I point to the iPod theory, in which I posit that the more music you have available to you, the less you care about it, or want to listen to it.

Why?

Who the fuck would want to look at a portfolio that size? A portfolio should be like 30-40, not 300-4,000.

BUT!

The thing is, not all of what is posted on photo.net is quality either. take this fucking idiot and his self indulgent uber-non-sensical 80's fantasy clusterfucking pig vomit for instance...
here
Shit like that makes me pull my hair out. All of it. It makes me want to poor gasoline on my eyes and stick my face over the the stove. It's so bad, so banal, so trashy strip-mall closeout art section at fucking Michaels, that my entire world view, as regards art and composition, and what people find pleasing, is uprooted and eviscerated.

WTF??? Is what I ask myself on a constant basis.

Yes art is subjective.

Yes, one cannot account for taste.

Yes, we are all of us philistines in any number of contexts that matter little to us (try having a conversation about NASCAR with someone knowlegable about the passtime for example).

My point is, I am so fucking out of step, that when I see shit like this, I think, "how can anyone find this anything other than infuriating? What is wrong with me?"

My other point is that, if you want to see some really wonderful work, some inspiring shit, you should spend some time looking at the better of the two sites.

Or don't. Whatever. See if I care.