Through meticulous research, framing, grabbing and reformatting, photographers themselves are assigning photos artistic value, in much the same way they do when shooting, toning or retouching a raw file or an analogue negative. "In its raw form, satellite imagery can be quite dull," says Mishka Henner, an artist who often works with Google’s images. "Cropping, adjusting, and forming a body of work out of them completely transforms these images into something that can be beautiful, terrifying and also insightful. If the internet remains free and open, I’m confident that in ten years photographic work like this will be as prevalent as imagery produced by hand-held cameras."
Art or not art is sort of a boring question to me -- I figure anything can be said to be art. What is interesting is the ethics of taking the photos and presenting them as your art?
I could imagine combing flickr and the rest of the internet and then the "Cropping, adjusting, and forming a body of work out of them completely transforms these images into something that can be beautiful, terrifying and also insightful." Or maybe comb through books and magazines, scanning photos, and then the "Cropping, adjusting, and forming a body of work out of them completely transforms these images into something that can be beautiful, terrifying and also insightful." Publish your books and maybe make some money and spend a few minutes in the limelight.
It helps a whole, whole lot to be plugged into the art network to get some of them to endorse what you have done though, I think.