Cream and Ice and Everything Nice

I started thinking recently about why I do what I do. I had considered it sort of a style of art or photography - yes, it's screen captures, but like photographs you have to arrange your figures and angles to create something pleasing out of things that you did not create. It can be an art, but it's more often for the pleasure of the photographer and a few people who might like the images created. I got my picture taken by a "professional" Second Life photographer, and what struck me at the time was how odd the process was, especially the assumption of the term professional. I've always done my own profile pictures with no photoshopping, so getting a photoshopped picture was decidedly odd, but if professional is defined by receiving money for something, than many photographers in Second Life are professional though I remain amateur. I've considered on and off taking some of my favorite images, texturing them a little with photoshop perhaps, putting them on prims with some sort of frame (or doing the bare canvas treatment of the sides of some prims) and then seeing if a gallery will take me - would that make these pictures "art"?

Part of my continuing bristling is an offhanded comment by some artists that Second Life art isn't real art, and that artists don't need prompts to create art, and I still twitch a bit to think of it, mostly because within myself I want to think of what I do as an art, if not art itself, but I know it's very different from putting acrylic on canvas even if the same rules of composition are being used. I've never been able to satisfactorily settle on what i consider art to be, though; taken in it's full context, art began as embellishment and decoration on functional things, and only shifted to non-utilitarian things, like paintings and conceptual art, as cultures became less survival-focused. In many ways, now many of us are as divorced from creating our own food as we can be. There is survival, but it's several pieces removed - earning money to purchase food other people farmed or even created. Likewise, our worlds have become less decorative as a built in function of walls and doors and ceilings, and more something placed on top - purchased and then displayed. Virtual images, like the ones I make, are even further removed - decorations for the walls of flickr and maybe a few folders, rather than anything more tangible. Where does the art live, then? Is it in the physical representations, the ideas behind it, or something else more ineffable?

( More pictures here. )

Credits:

Skin: De la Soul, Aestali - Cream Rose
Eyes: De La Soul, RooMee Eyes - Rainbow
Eyelashes: SLink, Eyelashes
Eyeshadow: Elymode, A Little Drama - yellow & blue
Ears: Illusions, Seelie Ears
Lipstick: Mock, Bella Vetro Gloss - Santa Fe
Hair: Rosy Mood, Sweetbun
Wings: Fancy Fairy, Azarelle
Hands: SLink, Rigged Mesh Hands
Jewelry: League, Pearls & Lace - natural ivory
Dress: Schadenfreude, Bubblegum Ice Cream Gluttony
Shoes: G Field, Lady Rose Shoes - tinted offwhite

Poses: Glitterati

Location: Goatswood
Light Settings: Places Astryls Wild
Water Settings: Mirror Water

Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping, only