3 - Gillian Brassil: What is art? with Diane Arbus & Richard Avedon

I feel pretty typical picking photographs for my discussion of what constitutes art, since that's what my background is in, but it's what SPEAKS to me, oh boy oh boy, so that's what I'm writing about. This is a photograph by Diane Arbus, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967. (You may recognize it a bit, since it inspired the twins in Kubrick's The Shining.) I think it's incredible and beautiful and simple, and I think it is art because you want to look at it again. This is absolutely not a picture I would see once and forget; in fact, the first time I saw about it, on the cover of the Arbus monograph, I kept flipping back to it, wanting to figure out what made it so intriguing. I think about this picture all the time, and every time I do, I am not content to have my mental image of it - I want to see THIS picture, over and over again.

To a lesser degree, that is true of this image of a beekeeper by Richard Avedon, taken in Davis, California in 1981. The difference here is that SO many of Avedon's pictures speak to me, that instead of a single photograph, I want to page through his entire books for hours and return to the most powerful images. But here again, my definition of art is true: it is something lasting and alluring; a work of art is something that will not let you relax until you look at it again, and the second you look away, it begins to haunt you again.