week eight: What does a landscape mean to you?

After reading the catalogue Manifest Destiny/ Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape, I was left questioning the use of landscape as subject in art. Was a landscape painting ever just a painting or have artist been illustrating a hierarchy of nature all along?  Painting that I though were just landscapes have become so much more outlining the shift from Anthropocentric to Biocentric, man being in the middle to part of the circle. That we Euro-American

 have sought harmony with nature for longer than first though after we got over the wildness of the landscape and are entitlement and domination over it. 

Yet I wonder why we have come to retrace are foots steps and recreate images that have already been captured. As Mark Klett is doing in his work Yosemite in time, are there really know interesting view that have not been captured. He has included the images of past photographers which does not convey that there has been any change in these pristine landscapes, that is just that these landscapes are pristine there should be know change. So what is the point? look at me I can make the same image over?

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, Lake Teanaya, 2002 from Yosemite in Time

And what about this newer tendency to create artificial landscapes from objects takes from the landscape. Why are we using stand ins for the landscape? Have we destroyed and polluted so much of are environment that it is less interesting and even depressing to look at. 

Ernie Button, grape nuts dune #7, from Cerealism