Village Voice Spring Photo Preview

The Village Voice has posted its Spring Photo Preview of gallery shows. Lots of great stuff is on the way, it appears. Kicking off this month are a show by Stephen Shore and the Diane Arbus retrospective at the Met. Others of interest are Larry Burrows, Thomas Struth, Gregory Crewdson and Tina Barney, among others.

A couple of years ago I was involved in a silly but heated debate in an online forum about what constituted art. (Few topics are as pointless as this one yet there is no end to people willing to debate it.) Some guy was insisting that a photo couldn't be art unless a human being made the decision to trigger the shutter. The example in question was whether a camera attached to a dog's neck, its shutter tripping randomly, could produce art. The post flatly stated that this was definitely not art. In May, Sam Easterson will try to prove that guy wrong.