Comment by yason

Just curious, but would you like to give me a couple of examples of recognized good art that isn't constrained by some rule, method, technique, or approach?

A large subset of photography isn't art. In fact, most everything people create isn't art per se—if it were, there wouldn't be good art nor bad art, just art and lots and lots of it. Spend a few hours on some photo-sharing site and see what people shoot. They're photographs, but rarely art.

But there are grades of art. Look at this search: http://goo.gl/2mLVI — a thousand sunset pictures, while maybe pretty, aren't generally art and not because it's the same sun in each picture. Most of these pictures have nothing to say. Now, some object lit by the sunset or silhouetted against it gives a lot more potential to be art. A carefully crafted study of a sunset in the form of a photograph can be art, but it requires finding certain constraints first, finding a certain angle that makes the photograph a message, and eventually conveying through the lens something that makes the viewer stop for a moment, to give an idea, to give a feeling, to give a confusion.