Painting

I found it very interesting that painting was considered a dead art form. Personally, I love to paint and draw and I am perusing a career in theses fields. Over the weekend I was working on a painting for my class and I realized why this form of art did diminish for a time. I am a bit of a perfectionist so it takes me more time then most to do my art, and with my tweaking it took me almost 12 hours to do one 20X24 in painting. Compare that to the form of taking photographs in which hundreds can be taken in minutes, painting takes a very long time. On the other hand, I feel that painting have more of a personality and individualized nature then pictures do. Lastly I think that over time the "longer" forms of art, like painting and drawing, will come back and be just as popular again.

Reality

I found it very interesting that photography is no longer considered "real" in the art world. I wonder if that means that other forms of art could lose their mean or value, like painting or drawing. And if they do, would it be a cycle like pattern? And is there ever a time when photography will be real again?

The body

During our lecture on the body I found Andres Serrano's morgue series very interesting, especially the "Death by Rat Poison" and "Fatal Meningitis II". I did not like the ones that were blatantly depicting "death" and the bloody body.  After looking at his work, I started exploring other art work about death and art involving the dead body. While doing this I came across picture of body farms and crime scene photos. What intrigued me was whether or not these scientific photos that are taken, while not thinking about art, could they still in fact be referred to as art? If not, why? Because they are taken out of context or not posed?

Personal identity

Since we are looking into different people's identity, I decided to look into a part of my own personal identity.  I have been hearing impaired all my life so it it a very important to the person I have been and the person I am today and will be in the future.  I plan to become an Art Therapist for all people, including the deaf and hard of hearing  I was looking into the different hearing impaired inspired art work there is and to my surprise there was very little.  It surprised me because I know there are hearing impaired and deaf artists out there but a lot of their art does not reflect it.  Then on the other hand, it confuses me how there is the "debate" of disable and handicap individuals being lesser the the norm, when a lot of time these are the people that are rising up against all the odds. Just because you have a disability does not mean you can not be exceptional. Even Beethoven was deaf.

Identity

Identity 
I thought that all of the identity artists we leaned about were interesting. The two that I found most interesting were Cindy Sherman and Annu Matthews because of their work on identity and politics. With Cindy Sherman, I love that she models for all her own pictures and makes it appear as though she is different people. As for Annu Matthews, I found it very interesting that so many people were protesting the attack and this is the way she chose to to express her feelings on the matter.