I continue to find myself thinking about this photo shoot. There is something compelling such thought, and so I feel that one way to think about it is as art.
There are technical issues that can be thought of in artistic terms. For example, I seem to be upset about the variations of paint schemes. I like my aerospace to be engineered. Isn’t there A Right Answer(TM)? How can there be several best paint schemes? (I have the same objection to BMW’s line about “We only make one thing: the Ultimate Driving Machine.”) And yet my favorite paintings are not photographic. If “too perfect”, I would be instantly distracted by whether or not the display was Photoshopped or Computer Generated. But how can one create a Wabi-Sabi esthetic on an aircraft? Maybe the answer is variations.
Hmm. Not satisfying. If the variations were created as deliberate imperfection, I think a much better choice would be to have an artist deliberately create visual asperity in the same way that game artists make a flat glass screen look like rough and rugged material.
Maybe the variation is symbolic? After all, Airbus is uniquely a product of multiple countries. Maybe the variation gives one a feel for laborers of many countries coming together to put these great birds in the air. Indeed, the making-of film does give a sense of this. Hmm, again, I think other designs could have achieved that better.
Another consequence of an artistic perspective is that it gives a lot of room for the enormous sums of money. How much is art worth? There is something stirring about the site of these planes, so who am I to say they did it wrong in some way? How much did this shot cost, and how much is it worth?
