Is this art ? This picture of the Cat ’s Eye Nebula , and other effigy from the Hubble Space Telescope , are hanging at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore . The expo of science picture has made people wonder whether a photo taken by a machine can be art . But the more you examine that question , the more you realize how contrived these pic really are .
What makes these photos art is the fact that humans have altered them , arguesthe Museum ’s Gary Vikan in a Baltimore Sun op - ed :
These photos of extinct space , like all photographs in art museum exhibitions , earn their public display precisely because of the originative interventions of a talented human being . In the compositor’s case of the Hubble , our visitant soon derive to recognize that the information from which these images are created are not visual but numeric , and that you and I could never “ see ” the Cat ’s Eye Nebula the way its photo shows it , even if a rocket could somehow impel us to its penny-pinching neighbourhood some 3,000 abstemious - old age away . Why ? Because the radiation emitted by the nebula and given visual expression in the photographic print is considerably outside the boundaries of human pile .
In other words , it ’s art because it ’s numbers translated into an look-alike . So in a sense , it ’s nonfigurative artistic production . But what really makes these double cool is n’t that they ’re “ art , ” whatever that means . Rather , it ’s the fact that they ’re maps , arguesblogger Her Majesty of Maps .
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