Is a Building Texture a piece of Art or is it a tool?

Here is question that has been zooming around in the black hole of my brain...

If you take a picture of a Brick wall and crop it and make it seamless then sell it so other people can use it to make objects with it, isn't that picture then just a tool to use for digital creators to make other items with?

Mind you that many Brick Walls look identical, and are far from unique.

I always thought that a piece of art had to be unique and expressive in order to qualify to be considered art.

I know there are certain textures that are mini Van Gough's and are obviously more than just a tool, but I am talking strictly about Building Textures such as surfaces that are commonly found everywhere, such as stone walls brick wood panels roofs etc etc..

Discuss...

This is a great question. I myself make textures, though mostly for personal use on my own projects. I think common textures, such as brick or concrete, more accurately define themselves as materials, so yes, in that respect they are builders' tools, but at the same time, it is possible to have varying degrees of quality, for example, a slider between Material and Art.

Take a brick floor or wall. You have two ways of achieving this texture, one is to photograph one and make it seamless, the other is to create it from scratch in a digital art suite. With the latter option, or by combining the two, it leans more towards art, as the creator is manipulating something in accordance with his or her imagination.

So my view on the subject is that you can't generalise building textures as a whole, they need to be judged individually to ascertain their artistic merit ;3

Just about anything has the potential to be regarded as Art since Marcel Duchamp signed off that urinal in 1917 and called it "Fountain".

Yes. (^_^)

As a photographer, I'd argue that even the raw photo-sourced texture is art by default. Regardless of any editing or enhancing. (^_^)y

It's a floor wax and a dessert topping. It's the license plate on your flaming snowmobile. It's the fading pawprints of the ice weasel that just tore your throat out and created art on the frosty tundra with Jackson Pollack splashes of your still warm and steaming blood.

Ephraim Kappler roars laughing: bad week is it?

Are you saying that categorically any photograph by default is art?

It's just like any other kind of art.

If I do it, it's art.
If you do it, it's a building tool.
If he does it, it's hackwork.

I think your categorization is too broad. It is like asking "Is everything printed on paper just an image?" Well, no... some of it is money, some is stock certificates, some is art, some is porn, some is ads, some is literature, some is truly a waste of paper...

A "building texture" that is nothing more than a seamless photographic image of something simple, like bricks or concrete or an oak plank, is at the lowest end of the spectrum of what qualifies as a "building texture". Those are just "building supplies" to me, like bricks and bags of mortar at the home improvement store. Is it valuable? Yes, just as the bricks are valuable to someone who wants to build a brick patio. And there is a certain degree of skill and art involved in making good textures at this end of the scale. Just not as much as with some other sets.

At the other end are coordinated collections of useful textures that may include a plain brick wall, that same wall with a shadow from the eaves above, maybe the same wall with cornice lighting effects, each of those walls with 5 types of windows, all with apropriate shadows around their edges for the projecting sill and frame, each window type with curtains open, curtains closed, and no curtains, and matching interior sides to all of these, possibly also with lighting or shadow effects applied, and then matching shutter and door texture sets too, that match the window trim colors... Do that well, and yes, it certainly is art. Is that more valuable? I would certainly think so.

In the real world, any photograph, however mundane or amaturish in its content, is considered a copyrightable piece of art. Digital images enjoy similar protections, though it can be harder to prove who actually originated a very simple digital image. The best work involves far more than a simple snapshot and a few tricks to make it seamless.

I once built a room where the textures were scripted to swap intermittently with negative versions I inverted in Photoshop. I'm quite incompetent when it comes to scripting so I failed to get them all to swap at exactly the same time - near enough but not quite - yet the random effect was startling on those occasions when all the surfaces changed at just the right moment.

I wish I'd kept a copy of the thing because I'd swear it was art.

In fact I'd swear it still is art even though I deleted it a long time ago.

Is this a "what is art" discussion, or a "what is a copyrightable artifact" discussion? If it is the first, then I'll let you all turn this into the next endless thread on these boards. If it is the latter, then the answer is pretty simple. Yes, it is copyrightable.

http://www.43folders.com/2009/03/11/kutiman

Hm
I think every picture you take, (regardless of what it is) is just a copy.
And hile were at it, since the discussion about user rights and copyright swaps allover the place, i would say that every Phozographer who takes a picture of a brick wall from a building that dosent belong to him, is a thief.

I would think it is the former.

It's both. It is a piece of art in and of itself AND it is a potential component (or "tool", if you want to use that particular word) for the creation of other works of art that might encompass it.

I will certainly agree, though, that for something as potentially mundane as a brick wall image, many will look very similar, and it's easy to say that any one is just as good as any other. This becomes especially true when you consider that there are many plugins available for Photoshop and other programs that will spit out a brick wall texture at the touch of a button.

But regardless, it's still art. Uniqueness is not a criteria in defining art. One could copy a Rembrant, after all, and both the copy and the source paiting would be art. They wouldn't both be original, of course, but they'd both be art, nonetheless.


As for the question of whether every photograph is art, the answer is yes, absolutely. Taking a photograph might not involve manipulation, but it always involves a judgment about what to and not to include in the frame. It's a composition, whether it was post-processed in any way or not.

It's arguable that such framing is the very definition of art. We see all colors of the rainbow all day long, but an artist makes a choice about which of those colors to remove from a canvas, and we call the remainder a painting. We hear the full range of audible frequencies all day long, but an artist makes a decision about which of those frequencies to remove from a given block of time, and we call the remainder music. A block of stone contains untold trillions of formless molecules of rock, but an artist makes a decision about which pieces to chisel away, and we call the remainder a sculpture. Human beings make all kinds of body movements all day long, but an artist makes a decision about which of those movements not to include in a particular sequence, and we call the remainder dance. And we see a gigantic panorama of visual noise everywhere we look, but an artist makes a decision about which of those elements not to capture with a camera, and we call the remainder a photograph. It's all the same thing.

It's not the technical means by which a work was made that matters in defining it as art (although the technicality itself can be an art as well). It's fact that it was made at all that makes it art.

The picture itself yes, it is nothing more than a copy of something that is already there. If you change and modify that copy into something cool and unsual, only then would or could it be considered artistic.

If I write a instrumental that uses a simple 3 chord progression over and over from start to finish and called it a song, I would loose a copyright infringement case, because those 3 chords are public domain. I doubt that a court would care if I used a noise gate when recording the song to eliminate the fuzzy edges that you get when you run a Triple Rec at full tilt... ie You cannot copyright a riff made up of existing notes. If you could there would more lawsuits than songs.

So just creating something does not automatically make it art.

Hmmm... Now we're debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. A chord can't be claimed as an artistic creation, perhaps, although you and I can play the same chord and sound VERY different. But two or three chords? Six? A dozen? How many chords does it take before you are comfortable calling YOUR chords artistic? John Cage wrote incredibly long (boring) pieces of music based on a small number of endlessly repeated chords.... one, in fact, with nothing but silence. Minimalistic music is like that. Mondrian didn't invent squares, but his very simple arrangements of colored squares are art. Some of Henry Moore's sculptures are no more complicated than a rounded stone. Trying to draw a solid line that separates what qualifies as art and what doesn't is a futile exercise. Art is what the artist and the viewing public decide that it is.

Absolutely not true. Louie Louie is 3 chords over and over again, and it's certainly copyrighted. So is Wild Thing. So is Paranoid. So are lots and lots of songs.

There are also plenty of songs that have just two chords in them. He's Got The Whole World In His Hands would be a good example, first copyrighted in 1958.

Want to get even simpler? How about Man In The Box by Alice In Chains? Almost the entire song is just one chord. And the very brief parts that are not only add two more, for a grand total of three. It's copyrighted too.

Let's get even simpler than that. Keith Urban has a song called One Chord Song. Want to guess how many chords are in it? And guess what else. That's right, it's copyrighted.

Or how about atonal music? No chords at all, but still copyrightable.

Want to take it to the extreme? Ever heard of a piece called 4'33" by John Cage? It was copyrighted in 1952. It consists of nothing but four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, or "tacet", as it's called in musical terms. It's actually considered to be a very important piece in the history of music.


In any case, I thought we were talking about what is art, not what is copyrightable.



Copyrighting a written song, and copyrighting a recording of that song are two different things. Your recorded demonstration of your noise gating technique could certainly be a copyrightable work, as could your performance in general, as well as your 3-chord composition itself.



I hate to break this to you, but ALL riffs are made of existing notes.



Creating something absolutely DOES make it art. Whether or not that art then gets copyrighted doesn't change that in any way.



ETA: I just noticed Rolig beat me to the punch on the John Cage stuff. Great minds again, eh Rolig?

Counterexample: John Cage's work 4'33".

And Argent too. Two's company, three is a crowd.

It's not a crowd; it's an audience. All the cool kids are in the John Cage fanclub.

Ok.. we were supposed to be talking about textures of boring building textures, not music..my fault for bringing that up, and btw you are wrong about that.. all the songs mentioned have other stuff going on, so they are a work, rather than a simple component of one such as a instrumental made of 3 chords which will not pass the copyright protection criteria.

The point was and still is, that without expression and uniqueness you cannot claim a picture to be a piece of art, specially when it is not presented as a piece of art but rather a tool or device to use.. much like a bucket of pain that you buy at the Orange Nightmare and then slop on your House.

So art can only be complete works, not the individual pieces of the whole?



Quite frankly, I'd say that if we're speaking strictly about building textures, then by dictionary definition, much of it could be considered art.



Though it could be disputed that it's printed, it would fit under definition 7, as well as fall under 8, 9, and 10, though those deal more with the creation than the result.

Quality textures, even if for mundane builds, usually take some amount of skill and finesse to create, along with proper tools and knowledge. Though they may not fall under what one would consider 'Fine Art' this does not make them any less artistic, or any less a work of art, especially when you consider that often it may take as much or more skill to create a seamless, well created texture, than it would to create an image that has no reason to exist beyond looking at, and so needs no other attributes (Such as proper shadowing, fake depth, the seamless tiling, and so on) that building textures so often use.

Just because it's going to be used for something larger than itself does not make it any less art, I'd say, but of course, that's just my opinion.

While you may not take a simple stucco texture to be artistic, think of the work that may have gone into it, the time spent with proper tools to create the look of stucco, rather than simply a blank background. It may only be a few button clicks, but perhaps each little tactile bump was hand painted and arranged in a way that the creator found most aesthetically pleasing. To you, just some wall. To them, time, effort, and art.