Morocco

Let's leave the free will controversy to the side and think about Marrakesh, Morocco.

My 2012 appointment book from American Express devotes the whole of April to the celebration of  Marrakesh as a wonderful vacation spot, where you can spend American Express traveller's checks enjoyably.



I've learned the following from perusing these pages:

1. The Majorelle Garden, a "treasured Marrakesh haven," was created in the 1920s by Jacques Majorelle back in the 1920s. Majorelle included a "bright blue studio" on these grounds, see above -- that structure is nowadays a museum of Islamic art.

2.   A traditional public bathhouse, known as a "hammam" offers a scrub-and-massage, which our friends at Amex recommend as "sure cure for souk fatigue."

3. UNESCO made the Merrakesh medina a World Heritage site in 1985.

That'll do for couch-bound tourism for today, eh?

The Phonograph

The concept of "art photography" seems to be straightforward.

In the quoted phrase "art" appears as a modifier. The suggestion is that some types of photography aren't artistic -- my tourist shots of Stonehenge, for example. They are momentos, acquired with the use of a readily available technology and without a lot of skill.

A real artist with a camera could, of course, do wonders with Stonehenge.

Somewhere in between "art photography" and "tourist snapshots" there exists the land of "commercial photography," in which craftsmen and women who pay careful attention to framing, light, the film-or-pixels question, help sell automobiles or hand soap.

But what about the humble phonograph? Is there are art phonography? Is the recording of sound limited to ther amateur-to-professional range or can this sort of memorialization, too, burst out the top end of the commercial into the artistic?

Or is that an invalid question? a category mistake?