Reading 9 - Warhol, Samaras, Art 21

I thought the reading of quotes of Warhol on himself was very interesting. I've never done any formal research to speak of on Andy Warhol. So I was glad to get a candid glimpse of his perspective on his own work and its message and also more importantly, what its message is not, because of how influential and critiqued his work has been. The Art 21 videos I continue to find similarly interesting - I feel we (or at least I) get a lot out of personal interviews with contemporary artists. It changes the meaning of a lot of the gallery works I've seen and hearing things straight from the artists' mouth offers the perfect explanation/perspective. Hiroshi Sugimoto, a japanese artist from one of the episodes was of particular interest. He is a photographer and "craft" artist who shoots and develops almost entirely in large format film using natural light and is very set in this medium (and of course extremely proficient). Art 21 featured one of his architecture series' in which he photographed famous buildings that are now somewhat old and dilapidated, but he shot them out of focus so that all of the imperfections of the buildings blended away. I thought this was a genius way of implementing out of focus photography and now that I have been shooting a lot of out of focus work, I can appreciate the subtleties of blur in an image and his use of large format which may, to some, seem a bit overkill.