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Wednesday, January 11, 2006

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

It is impossible, today, to experience a work of art the same way as it would have been experienced 100 or 200 or 400 years ago. Orchestras can play baroque music on original instruments; churches can display the same altarpieces they've had since they were built; but still audiences will pack in with a worldview and set of assumptions utterly alien to the original artists.

Let's say I go to an art gallery – or even a church, for that matter – too look at a Caravaggio. As Edward Winkleman says, "there's often as much value in the pilgramage as there is in the actual viewing". The pilgramage, in this case, is likely to involve being herded onto a jet plane after going through X-rays and security precautions; it will also include all manner of other carefully timed and scheduled transportation. And assuming that the Caravaggio is in Italy, the pilgramage is attendant upon the fact that I chose to visit Italy over Peru, or Russia, or Thailand.

Once I finally get to the home of the painting, I'll probably pay some kind of admission fee, and eventually jostle my way through a pack of tourists in comfortable clothes to a point where I can admire an expensively-secured and artificially-lighted painting. Maybe I'll be listening to an audio guide as well, giving me a bit of background on what I'm looking at. I've turned my phone off, so calls go straight to voicemail. But I'll suspect that if I make it into an internet cafe, I'll discover at least three urgent emails which need responding to – assuming that my inbox hasn't overflowed with undeleted spam.

In other words, synchronic viewing – the art or science of putting oneself in the place of the audience for whom the work of art was intended – is at best an academic exercise, and at worst impossible. For a garden-variety art lover, to experience a work of art is to experience it diachronically. The work was made then, but we are now. Either the work still has artistic power, or it doesn't.

Caravaggios, then, today compete for our attention with everything from email to tiger sharks. When we look at them, we're very likely to think of them as representational art – a concept, of course, which came into existence centuries after Caravaggio's death. What we admire in them may or may not be the same thing that viewers admired four hundred years ago: great art often has the characteristic of being perceived as great by a broad range of viewers, despite meaning very different things to different people. And in any case, paintings, like anything else, change – physically – over time. The colours we see today are simply not the same as the colours that Caravaggio painted: we are, after all, reacting to a centuries-old artifact.

So I'm puzzled by the ire with which the aforementioned Winkleman greets an exhibition now on show at the Loyola University Museum of Art. One of the primary purposes of any museum, especially one in a university, is education, and the Loyola museum has found itself a novel and really rather effective way of teaching people about Caravaggio: by using reproductions, it has put on what it calls "an impossible exhibition" – a show which could never be brought together using the original paintings.

Paintings have been reproduced for decades, of course. The basic pedagogic tool of any art history teacher is the slide show, while most homes include at least a few art books or magazines. There are hundreds of millions of people who can recognise the Mona Lisa despite never having seen it in real life; millions more have spent many an enjoyable hour in front of the television, learning about art from the likes of Kenneth Clark, Robert Hughes or even Wendy Beckett.

Would Winkleman sneer in the same way at, say, the Hughes television series on Goya? Suppose that PBS said in a press release that

The aim is to let millions of people all over the world see these masterpieces of Spanish art. It's an example of the 'democratization' of art.

Would Winkleman respond like this?

That is a flat-out bald-faced lie! The aim is absolutely nothing of the sort. This project accomplishes nothing...NOTHING...toward letting millions of people all over the world see any masterpiece. The attendees are not "seeing" a single "masterpiece." They're looking at television.

It seems improbable: one thinks the blogger doth protest rather too much. And in fact Winkleman's vehemence with regard to Loyola University is not a function of the inadequacy of their chosen medium to convey the effect of the painted originals – quite the opposite, in fact. Few people are likely to consider watching a television program to be in any way equivalent to looking at a painting. But at Loyola, the reproductions are so good that Winkleman fears, he says in a comment, that "'real' artwork exhibitions will begin to seem quaint and pointless."

Loyola, in conjunction with Italian television station RAI, has taken advantage of today's technology to mount an exhibition which has not been possible in the past. With the aid of high-resolution digital photography and modern backlighting techniques, Caravaggio's paintings have been reproduced at actual size and in great detail. The reproductions are utterly flat, of course: while you can see cracks in the canvas, you can't admire the texture of the brushstrokes.

That's a deal-breaker for Winkleman:

ARGHHHH!!!! That's like saying you can see the members of the orchestra moving their arms, hands, and lips, but not hear the actual sounds coming from their instruments. What's the freakin' point???? It's called PAINT, you halfwits. If the texture wasn't integral to "seeing" the image, Caravaggio would have drawn the damn things.

I have to disagree. Caravaggio's paintings are pretty flat: he was more interested in light, colour and composition than in the texture of the paint. Paint was the best medium for what he wanted to do, and in fact anybody who wants to see the original paintings from which these reproductions are taken can travel the world and do so – although it's likely to take a long time and many thousands of dollars. But for somebody who is interested in Caravaggio but who doesn't have either the time or the inclination to go on such a grand tour, this exhibition provides at the very least an excellent idea of what his paintings look like – a much better idea than looking at slides or book plates would.

In fact, Winkelman's quibble about paint texture has very little to do with his real objection to the show: if somehow the reproductions were made three-dimensional so that the paint texture, too, was reproduced, his distaste would probably only increase. Winkleman's real issue is ontological, not phenomenological. There is One True Painting, any attempt to artificially reproduce it in a museum sestting is heretical, and in fact the closer that the reproduction gets to the original, the worse the heresy.

Winkleman does, in fact, concede the educational value of the exhibition. He just says he doesn't want to see it an art gallery, presumably because he thinks that art galleries should show only art. It's a superficially reasonable point, but there are two flaws with it. Firstly, if this show isn't put on at a museum, it probably won't be put on at all: what other institutions exist with the ability and mission to put on an exhibition such as this? Secondly, the display of art at a museum is ultimately a means rather than an end in itself: if a museum put on a show but nobody went to see it, that show would be a complete waste of time and money. The important thing is the experience of the exhibition-goers, not the static presence of the art itself.

People who go to see this show know full well that they're seeing reproductions and not originals. They suffer no injury in doing so, and in fact might well learn from and enjoy looking at the reproductions on show. When something causes good and no harm, I'm generally in favour of it – especially when the arguments against are all of the slippery-slope type. (Winkleman loves to extrapolate into a hypothetical future where all local museums put on shows like this on a regular basis, thereby sating their local populations' hunger for art, and destroying demand to see the original works of art in major metropolitan centers. It doesn't seem to occur to him that it's much more likely that the opposite is true, and that exposure to art in reproduction only serves to increase the desire to go out and see it in real life.)

It's worth noting, however, that the Loyola museum is quite up-front about the derivative nature of the reproductions on show. No one is claiming that looking at the reproductions is the optimal way of experiencing Caravaggio; the entire exhibition is predicated on the idea that it's second-best, even if an actual exhibition of all those paintings in one place would be a logistical impossibility.

In concert halls around America, however, a more invidious use of technology is being increasingly introduced – amplification. When singers or instruments are amplified, there is usually no notice given to the audience. And as Tony Tommasini recently noted in the New York Times, the spread of amplification could have an enormously deleterious effect on opera around the world. He tells the story, for instance, of the principals in Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti in a recent production at Caramoor. The artistic director thought they were being overpowered, and, as a solution to that problem, miked them up.

Tommasini claims, quite plausibly, that if singers don't have to work on beefing up their voices, they won't. And opera is likely to go the way of Broadway, with the beauty and subtlety of the unamplified human voice replaced by a more bombastic entertainment and the audience moving from active to passive engagement with the performers.

I generally believe that if a performance is being amplified, there's a good chance it doesn't need to be performed live at all. What, exactly, is the point of having a live band at a Broadway show? It's vestigial, really, and doomed, in time, to obsolescence. At the opera, however, appreciation for the beauty of the unamplified music is at the heart of the artform. If that is taken away, the performance can become something of a fiasco.

So the introduction of technology into the exhibition of a centuries-old artform is not always a good thing. If museums started showing reproductions instead of originals, then I would most certainly object – just as I object to opera houses showing amplified opera instead of unamplified opera. But if you're honest about what you're doing, technology can be a great help. Since all Broadway shows are amplified anyway, why not use a recording rather than a live band? It would save on costs, and maybe help bring ticket prices down from their current insane levels. It would also allow the director to have much more control over the subtleties of the music, and the ability to create exactly the sound he wanted.

But if fine art is being presented as fine art, then interfere technologically with the original as little as you possibly can.

Posted by Felix at 0:32 EST | Comments (2)

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