Museum Quality, 2016
Bob Rogers
ISBN: 978-1936658350 – Language: English – Paperback: 56 pages
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When asked whether his photographs should be considered “art”, Bob Rogers quotes the anthropologist Marvin Harris who states, “No one has succeeded in formulating a definition of art that would permit an anthropologist to segregate art from nonart in all the cultures of the world.” It comes as little surprise, then, that no one else can, either. An infectious and playful sense of irony informs Rogers’ photographic work as well as the long-repressed essay, “The Value of Art”, which, turns the Hegelian model of traditional art criticism on its head and speaks to the emptiness and essential loneliness of our time, where economics has become the main engine that drives contemporary, gallery-art production and the conversations that surround it. Where once religion and the celebration of nature, and life’s eternal mysteries served as the springboard for creative output, its collectivity and possession, today we stand solitary before astronomically expensive images of others who stare equally solitarily at images of themselves.