Google’s Art Project
This is a detail view of part of the bed in Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. I got it from Google’s new Art Project, a site where, apparently, those hoarders everyone feels ambivalent about plan to archive high resolution renderings of the world’s artworks like they’ve archived everything else. But after having spent a good hour on the site, I can’t say it’s not an awesome tool for art lovers. There’s a whole luscious side to artworks that you’re missing if you’re not able to see them close up, and for those of us who can’t jet around the globe whenever it strikes us, this offers a pretty reasonable substitute for the experience you’re going to get in a museum, that is, with your face pressed to the protective glass.
I’ve thought a lot about the experience of art via jpeg, or through reproduction in general (since this is how I take most of it in) versus the direct gallery experience. The only conclusion I can come to is that both are absolutely valid art experiences, and there’s nothing saying the humbler means can’t afford the richer experience. All experiences of art, after all, are imperfect; you take what you can from it however you can get it. And since so much of any significant encounter with art comes down to factors such as your receptivity to it and capacity for appreciating it, the network of experiences that lead up to your seeing it, and, say, whether your tired back or the kid mounted on it is distracting you, there’s nothing saying that even when face to face with a masterpiece you’d be the right person and it the right work of art or the time right.
I remember the day that I finally “got” Francis Bacon. For a long time I had no feeling for his paintings at all and then one day, after looking through a couple of monographs in a book store - I ended up buying both of them - and spending the whole day looking at them, I had something like a road to damascus moment if I’ve ever had one. Would I have gotten even more out of the paintings if I’d seen them in a gallery? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe I wouldn’t have felt anything at all. I’ve still only seen a few Bacons up close but I don’t have any reservations about calling him one of my favorite artists.
Bacon had his own experience like this with a Velasquez, the Pope that obsessed him for a good part of his life and became the inspiration for many of his own paintings. In fact, he liked it so much in reproduction that he eschewed the direct experience, even when he could easily have gone and seen it while in Madrid, and instead, apparently buying book after book with it in, collected reproductions of it.
But there is a lot to be said for seeing a painting close up. It’s a different thing, and it’s less easy, looking at them this way, to forget the aesthetic dimension, the How of the painting, the side of art appreciation that entails running your eyes over a paint surface in grateful participation, retracing the brushwork that made it, when you have both the tactile level and the overview and you can track back and forth between them. Roberta Smith, writing about the Art Project a couple of days ago, says it’s “a mesmerizing, world-expanding tool for self-education.” I think that “self-education” part gets it right. It’s not a replacement for looking at art in museums. It’s a reference, and next to seeing it in the raw, a pretty useful second.
A close-up of Chris Ofili’s No Woman, No Cry (right). And you can get much much closer still…
Google’s Art Project
This is a detail view of part of the bed in Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. I got it from Google’s new Art Project, a site where, apparently, those hoarders everyone feels ambivalent about plan to archive high resolution renderings of the world’s artworks like they’ve archived everything else. But after having spent a good hour on the site, I can’t say it’s not an awesome tool for art lovers. There’s a whole luscious side to artworks that you’re missing if you’re not able to see them close up, and for those of us who can’t jet around the globe whenever it strikes us, this offers a pretty reasonable substitute for the experience you’re going to get in a museum, that is, with your face pressed to the protective glass.
I’ve thought a lot about the experience of art via jpeg, or through reproduction in general (since this is how I take most of it in) versus the direct gallery experience. The only conclusion I can come to is that both are absolutely valid art experiences, and there’s nothing saying the humbler means can’t afford the richer experience. All experiences of art, after all, are imperfect; you take what you can from it however you can get it. And since so much of any significant encounter with art comes down to factors such as your receptivity to it and capacity for appreciating it, the network of experiences that lead up to your seeing it, and, say, whether your tired back or the kid mounted on it is distracting you, there’s nothing saying that even when face to face with a masterpiece you’d be the right person and it the right work of art or the time right.
I remember the day that I finally “got” Francis Bacon. For a long time I had no feeling for his paintings at all and then one day, after looking through a couple of monographs in a book store - I ended up buying both of them - and spending the whole day looking at them, I had something like a road to damascus moment if I’ve ever had one. Would I have gotten even more out of the paintings if I’d seen them in a gallery? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe I wouldn’t have felt anything at all. I’ve still only seen a few Bacons up close but I don’t have any reservations about calling him one of my favorite artists.
Bacon had his own experience like this with a Velasquez, the Pope that obsessed him for a good part of his life and became the inspiration for many of his own paintings. In fact, he liked it so much in reproduction that he eschewed the direct experience, even when he could easily have gone and seen it while in Madrid, and instead, apparently buying book after book with it in, collected reproductions of it.
But there is a lot to be said for seeing a painting close up. It’s a different thing, and it’s less easy, looking at them this way, to forget the aesthetic dimension, the How of the painting, the side of art appreciation that entails running your eyes over a paint surface in grateful participation, retracing the brushwork that made it, when you have both the tactile level and the overview and you can track back and forth between them. Roberta Smith, writing about the Art Project a couple of days ago, says it’s “a mesmerizing, world-expanding tool for self-education.” I think that “self-education” part gets it right. It’s not a replacement for looking at art in museums. It’s a reference, and next to seeing it in the raw, a pretty useful second.
A close-up of Chris Ofili’s No Woman, No Cry (right). And you can get much much closer still…
