"The Ethics of Digital Manipulation" Response - Homework 2

To be perfectly honest, I don't completely understand why the ethics of digital manipulation are being questioned. It seems to me that this same thing has been discussed not only multiple times, but with the invention or development of every new art form. The only way to stay morally accepted in art, is to not claim to be what you are not. Do not lie with the intent of deceiving people into firmly believing that subjective art is fact. The concept of a "genre" in storytelling was to blatantly tell people that what they are reading is simply true or imaginative. That is why we have categories such as "Fiction" and "Non-fiction". Even painting can be separated into movements and categories (not exactly in the same way, but the fundamentals are there): "Abstraction" "Photo-realism" "Surrealism", etc. Art deserves to be expressed in every way by everyone. If ethics are going to be so brutally discussed, why make art at all? If you are a news broadcaster, tell the truth. If you are a storyteller, tell an imaginative tale. I understand that they are constantly confused (Hello, Fox News), but they have no excuse for being confused. I fully agree with the author's sense of ethics and morality, but I think at this point, they should not be up for debate. As long as the artist says something such as "Hey, this is just my interpretation of the thing, not the thing itself", it has a right to not be questioned. But if the artist says "Hey, this is actually the thing and can be used as an accurate portrayal of the thing", then it is no longer just art and has the right to be questioned. If people constantly intentionally lie to each other all of the time (whether through stories or photos or documentaries, etc), no one will be able to make sense of the world and we will all merely be living in each other's imaginations. If it happens unintentionally, then hopefully there are other truthful sources to back it up. Everything we know is subjective. Every absolute truth that we think we know is most likely made up or manipulated in one form or another. But as long as we know that, and as long as every one is on the same page of not intentionally lying to each other, photograph manipulation should not be a bigger issue than any other source of truth/not-truth that has been around for hundreds of years.