Digitized Art and Artists
Feb. 8th, 2011 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purejuice1.
"Technology disruption is your friend" use it to rethink the way you work -as a positive, not negative #watech4good @akhtarbad
10:43 AM Feb 4th via CoTweet
http://twitter.com/kanter
http://www.bethkanter.org/
2.
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February 6, 2011
The Work of Art in the Age of Google
By ROBERTA SMITH
If art is among your full-blown obsessions or just a budding interest, Google, which has already altered the collective universe in so many ways, changed your life last week. It unveiled its Art Project, a Web endeavor that offers easy, if not yet seamless, access to some of the art treasures and interiors of 17 museums in the United States and Europe.
It is very much a work in progress, full of bugs and information gaps, and sometimes blurry, careering virtual tours. But it is already a mesmerizing, world-expanding tool for self-education. You can spend hours exploring it, examining paintings from far off and close up, poking around some of the world’s great museums all by your lonesome. I have, and my advice is: Expect mood swings. This adventure is not without frustrations.
On the virtual tour of the Uffizi in Florence the paintings are sometimes little more than framed smudges on the wall. (The Dürer room: don’t go there.) But you can look at Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” almost inch by inch. It’s nothing like standing before the real, breathing thing. What you see is a very good reproduction that offers the option to pore over the surface with an adjustable magnifying rectangle. This feels like an eerie approximation, at a clinical, digital remove, of the kind of intimacy usually granted only to the artist and his assistants, or conservators and preparators.
There are high-resolution images of more than 1,000 artworks in the Art Project (googleartproject.com) and virtual tours of several hundred galleries and other spaces inside the 17 participating institutions. In addition each museum has selected a single, usually canonical work — like the Botticelli “Venus” — for star treatment. These works have been painstakingly photographed for super-high, mega-pixel resolution. (Although often, to my eye, the high-resolution version seems as good as the mega-pixel one.)
The Museum of Modern Art selected van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” and you can see not only the individual colors in each stroke, but also how much of the canvas he left bare. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s star painting is Bruegel’s “Harvesters,” with its sloping slab of yellow wheat and peasants lunching in the foreground. Deep in the background is a group of women skinny-dipping in a pond that I had never noticed before.
In the case of van Gogh’s famous “Bedroom,” the star painting chosen by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I was able to scrutinize the five framed artworks depicted on the chamber’s walls: two portraits, one still life and two works, possibly on paper, that are so cursory they look like contemporary abstractions. And I was enthralled by the clarity of the star painting of the National Gallery in London, Hans Holbein’s “Ambassadors,” and especially by the wonderful pile of scientific instruments — globes, sun dials, books — that occupy the imposing two-tiered stand flanked by the two young gentlemen.
Google maintains that, beyond details you may not have noticed before, you can see things not normally visible to the human eye. And it is probably true. I could make out Bruegel’s distant bathers when I visited the Met for a comparison viewing, but not the buttocks of one skinny-dipper, visible above the waves using the Google zoom. Still, the most unusual aspects of the experience are time, quiet and stasis: you can look from a seated position in the comfort of your own home or office cubicle, for as long as you want, without being jostled or blocked by other art lovers.
At the same time the chance to look closely at paintings, especially, as made things, really to study the way artists construct an image on a flat surface, is amazing, and great practice for looking at actual works. And while the Internet makes so much in our world more immediate, it is still surprising to see what it can accomplish with the subtle physicality of painting, whether it is the nervous, fractured, tilting brush strokes of Cezanne’s “Château Noir” from 1903-4, at the Museum of Modern Art, or the tiny pelletlike dots that make up most of Chris Ofili’s “No Woman No Cry” from about a century later at the Tate Modern in London (the only postwar work among the 17 mega-pixel stars).
The Ofili surface also involves collaged images of Stephen Lawrence, whose 1993 murder in London became a turning point in Britain’s racial politics; along with scatterings of glitter that read like minuscule, oddly cubic bits of gold and silver; and three of those endlessly fussed-over clumps of elephant dung, carefully shellacked and in two cases beaded with the word No. Take a good look and see how benign they really are. (You can also see the painting glow in the dark, revealing the lines “R.I.P./Stephen Lawrence/1974-1993.”)
Another innovation of the Art Project is Google’s adaptation of its Street View program for indoor use. This makes it possible, for example, to navigate through several of the spacious salons at Versailles gazing at ceiling murals — thanks to the 360-degree navigation — or to get a sharper, more immediate sense than any guidebook can provide of the light, layout and ambience of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It also means that if your skill set is shaky, you can suddenly be 86’ed from the museum onto the street, as I was several times while exploring the National Gallery.
Keep in mind that usually only a few of the many, many works encountered on a virtual tour are available for high-res or super-high-res viewing. And those few aren’t always seen in situ, hanging in a gallery. The architectural mise-en-scène is the main event of the virtual tours in most cases, from the Uffizi’s long, grand hallways to the gift shop of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the modest galleries of the Kampa Museum in Prague, where the star paintings is Frantisek Kupka’s 1912-13 “Cathedral,” the only abstraction among what could be called the Google 17.
The Art Project has been hailed as a great leap forward in terms of the online art experience, which seems debatable, since most museums have spent at least the last decade — and quite a bit of money — developing Web access to works in their collections. On the site of the National Gallery, for example, you can examine the lush surface of Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus” with a zoom similar to the Art Project’s. Still, Google offers a distinct and extraordinary benefit in its United Nations-like gathering of different collections under one technological umbrella, enabling easy online travel among them.
When you view a work by one artist at one museum, clicking on the link “More works by this artist” will produce a list of all the others in the Art Project system. But some fine-tuning is needed here. Sometimes the link is missing, and sometimes it links only to other works in that museum. Other tweaks to consider: including the dates of the works on all pull-down lists, and providing measurements in inches as well as centimeters.
Despite the roster of world-class museums, there are notable omissions: titans like the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, not to mention most major American museums, starting with the National Gallery in Washington. Without specifying who turned it down, Google says that many museums were approached, that 17 signed on, and that it hopes to add more as the project develops.
This implies an understandable wait-and-see attitude from many institutions, including some of the participants. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, has made only one large gallery available — the large room of French Post-Impressionist works that kicks off its permanent collection displays — along with 17 paintings that are all, again, examples of 19th-century Post-Impressionism. (Oh, and you can wander around the lobby.)
On first glance this seems both unmodern in focus and a tad miserly, given that several museums offer more than 100 works and at least 15 galleries. But MoMA is being pragmatic. According to Kim Mitchell, the museum’s chief communications officer , the 17 paintings “are among the few in our collection that do not raise the copyright-related issues that affect so many works of modern and contemporary art.” In other words, if and when the Art Project is a clear success, the Modern will decide if it wants to spend the time and money to secure permission for Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and the like to appear on it.
This might also hold true for the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, which owns Picasso’s “Guernica,” but has so far limited its participation primarily to 13 paintings by the Cubist Juan Gris and 35 photographs from the Spanish Civil War. Needless to say, the works and galleries that each museum has selected for the first round of the Art Project makes for some interesting institutional psychoanalysis.
From where I sit Google’s Art Project looks like a bandwagon everyone should jump on. It makes visual knowledge more accessible, which benefits us all.
In many ways this new Google venture is simply the latest phase of simulation that began with the invention of photography, which is when artworks first acquired second lives as images and in a sense, started going viral. These earlier iterations — while never more than the next best thing — have been providing pleasure for more than a century through art books, as postcards, posters and art-history-lecture slides. For all that time they have been the next best thing to being there. Now the next best thing has become better, even if it will never be more than next best.
3.
This is the effect of real handmade paintings or sculpture or outsider art on me. I think I've also written about the projectile tears which shot from my eyes the first time I saw Magdalena Abakanowicz's Backs or the jacket embroidered with threads from rags unravelled in the mental institution laundry room over decades by an inmate. As a scholar of genocide art, I have seen some of the world's most graphic photographs, from Nick Ut's Pulitzer-Prize-shot of Kim Phuc to the Tuol Sleng mug shots of Cambodians with their death numbers pinned to their bare flesh, and not one of them has elicited any such reaction from me.
While photography reveals -- as Smith notably notes, teeny background skinny dippers she'd never seen before in an iconic Breughel Google now allows her to survey pixel by pixel -- things one did not know before, and it is notable according to its best philosophers for its ability to abstract and embalm its subjects (not to say inherently objectify the oppressed in a way the plastic arts, though just as patriarchal, cannot), the only impact photography has really is photographing people at the moment of their death, or embalming. A photograph is a war trophy in a way even the most swag-generated patron's painting is not.
4.
As we all know, the artist, like Picasso, who assiduously cultivates advertisements for himself, will always be successful. Picasso was also very talented. Not more so than hundreds of others who quietly kept to their studios and painted, like Bonnard. For one. What they achieve is what I can only call "immediate luminosity", which is one of James' three pragmatic criteria for judging religious ideas. Picasso, while brilliant in every way like a camera, sublime in intellectual achievement, like Spielberg/Cameron is a technical genius whose content, notoriously like that of all American movies, is conservative, if not derriere garde aesthetically (Aristotelian tragic hero values, as if history were in fact the story of 300 white guys in Paris), both appallingly simple-minded, racist and sexist (Avatar), really shockingly anti-modern and possibly fascist. Ariel Dorfman on Donald Duck? Is totally correct (one reason the po-mos flip me out: there is no moral dimension or content adjudication to their decon of pop cult).
It is supremely successful in terms of Marxist fetish commodity, but it is not only not immediately luminous, it puts out the light in the ways I've suggested.
5.
Google Art has trophy-fied the 17 works of art they chose to pixelate (Van Gogh's Starry Night, who chose?). As anybody who has actually seen the painting can tell you it is not warm and fuzzy. It is so sad you can hardly breathe, a very disturbing cold and ultimately uplifting massive presence in a room, an object completely different from the one Google has pixelated.
6.
And I think that's what Twittering, and the whole universe of soliciting microloans for starving artists is all about. Multitasking silences utterly the stream of consciousness. Out of which comes art, as we all know, as well as the discernment of the authentic.
7.
I really want not to be a curmudgeon. But I think Bill Gates has brainwashed people and now Google is defining the canon as well as the Gaze and the canonical way of looking at art. No. By God. No.
1972, Nick Ut. I own, and have read, an entire PhD. thesis on the iconographic and religious "composition" of this photograph. Like Roberta Smith says, one of photography's three magic tricks is to reveal attributes and clues which you never saw before, like the murder in Blow-up or the skinny dippers in the background of the Breughel painting. In that case, however, those elements actually exist in the universe, where as the Christian iconographic composition of this photograph is dubious in the extreme, as is any notion that Nick Ut composed it at all. He framed it, and got back to the office alive, with the undeveloped film intact, all of which deserve enormous respect. Compose? No. This is a picture of dead people.
"Technology disruption is your friend" use it to rethink the way you work -as a positive, not negative #watech4good @akhtarbad
10:43 AM Feb 4th via CoTweet
http://twitter.com/kanter
http://www.bethkanter.org/
2.
Reprints
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
February 6, 2011
The Work of Art in the Age of Google
By ROBERTA SMITH
If art is among your full-blown obsessions or just a budding interest, Google, which has already altered the collective universe in so many ways, changed your life last week. It unveiled its Art Project, a Web endeavor that offers easy, if not yet seamless, access to some of the art treasures and interiors of 17 museums in the United States and Europe.
It is very much a work in progress, full of bugs and information gaps, and sometimes blurry, careering virtual tours. But it is already a mesmerizing, world-expanding tool for self-education. You can spend hours exploring it, examining paintings from far off and close up, poking around some of the world’s great museums all by your lonesome. I have, and my advice is: Expect mood swings. This adventure is not without frustrations.
On the virtual tour of the Uffizi in Florence the paintings are sometimes little more than framed smudges on the wall. (The Dürer room: don’t go there.) But you can look at Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” almost inch by inch. It’s nothing like standing before the real, breathing thing. What you see is a very good reproduction that offers the option to pore over the surface with an adjustable magnifying rectangle. This feels like an eerie approximation, at a clinical, digital remove, of the kind of intimacy usually granted only to the artist and his assistants, or conservators and preparators.
There are high-resolution images of more than 1,000 artworks in the Art Project (googleartproject.com) and virtual tours of several hundred galleries and other spaces inside the 17 participating institutions. In addition each museum has selected a single, usually canonical work — like the Botticelli “Venus” — for star treatment. These works have been painstakingly photographed for super-high, mega-pixel resolution. (Although often, to my eye, the high-resolution version seems as good as the mega-pixel one.)
The Museum of Modern Art selected van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” and you can see not only the individual colors in each stroke, but also how much of the canvas he left bare. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s star painting is Bruegel’s “Harvesters,” with its sloping slab of yellow wheat and peasants lunching in the foreground. Deep in the background is a group of women skinny-dipping in a pond that I had never noticed before.
In the case of van Gogh’s famous “Bedroom,” the star painting chosen by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I was able to scrutinize the five framed artworks depicted on the chamber’s walls: two portraits, one still life and two works, possibly on paper, that are so cursory they look like contemporary abstractions. And I was enthralled by the clarity of the star painting of the National Gallery in London, Hans Holbein’s “Ambassadors,” and especially by the wonderful pile of scientific instruments — globes, sun dials, books — that occupy the imposing two-tiered stand flanked by the two young gentlemen.
Google maintains that, beyond details you may not have noticed before, you can see things not normally visible to the human eye. And it is probably true. I could make out Bruegel’s distant bathers when I visited the Met for a comparison viewing, but not the buttocks of one skinny-dipper, visible above the waves using the Google zoom. Still, the most unusual aspects of the experience are time, quiet and stasis: you can look from a seated position in the comfort of your own home or office cubicle, for as long as you want, without being jostled or blocked by other art lovers.
At the same time the chance to look closely at paintings, especially, as made things, really to study the way artists construct an image on a flat surface, is amazing, and great practice for looking at actual works. And while the Internet makes so much in our world more immediate, it is still surprising to see what it can accomplish with the subtle physicality of painting, whether it is the nervous, fractured, tilting brush strokes of Cezanne’s “Château Noir” from 1903-4, at the Museum of Modern Art, or the tiny pelletlike dots that make up most of Chris Ofili’s “No Woman No Cry” from about a century later at the Tate Modern in London (the only postwar work among the 17 mega-pixel stars).
The Ofili surface also involves collaged images of Stephen Lawrence, whose 1993 murder in London became a turning point in Britain’s racial politics; along with scatterings of glitter that read like minuscule, oddly cubic bits of gold and silver; and three of those endlessly fussed-over clumps of elephant dung, carefully shellacked and in two cases beaded with the word No. Take a good look and see how benign they really are. (You can also see the painting glow in the dark, revealing the lines “R.I.P./Stephen Lawrence/1974-1993.”)
Another innovation of the Art Project is Google’s adaptation of its Street View program for indoor use. This makes it possible, for example, to navigate through several of the spacious salons at Versailles gazing at ceiling murals — thanks to the 360-degree navigation — or to get a sharper, more immediate sense than any guidebook can provide of the light, layout and ambience of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It also means that if your skill set is shaky, you can suddenly be 86’ed from the museum onto the street, as I was several times while exploring the National Gallery.
Keep in mind that usually only a few of the many, many works encountered on a virtual tour are available for high-res or super-high-res viewing. And those few aren’t always seen in situ, hanging in a gallery. The architectural mise-en-scène is the main event of the virtual tours in most cases, from the Uffizi’s long, grand hallways to the gift shop of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the modest galleries of the Kampa Museum in Prague, where the star paintings is Frantisek Kupka’s 1912-13 “Cathedral,” the only abstraction among what could be called the Google 17.
The Art Project has been hailed as a great leap forward in terms of the online art experience, which seems debatable, since most museums have spent at least the last decade — and quite a bit of money — developing Web access to works in their collections. On the site of the National Gallery, for example, you can examine the lush surface of Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus” with a zoom similar to the Art Project’s. Still, Google offers a distinct and extraordinary benefit in its United Nations-like gathering of different collections under one technological umbrella, enabling easy online travel among them.
When you view a work by one artist at one museum, clicking on the link “More works by this artist” will produce a list of all the others in the Art Project system. But some fine-tuning is needed here. Sometimes the link is missing, and sometimes it links only to other works in that museum. Other tweaks to consider: including the dates of the works on all pull-down lists, and providing measurements in inches as well as centimeters.
Despite the roster of world-class museums, there are notable omissions: titans like the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, not to mention most major American museums, starting with the National Gallery in Washington. Without specifying who turned it down, Google says that many museums were approached, that 17 signed on, and that it hopes to add more as the project develops.
This implies an understandable wait-and-see attitude from many institutions, including some of the participants. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, has made only one large gallery available — the large room of French Post-Impressionist works that kicks off its permanent collection displays — along with 17 paintings that are all, again, examples of 19th-century Post-Impressionism. (Oh, and you can wander around the lobby.)
On first glance this seems both unmodern in focus and a tad miserly, given that several museums offer more than 100 works and at least 15 galleries. But MoMA is being pragmatic. According to Kim Mitchell, the museum’s chief communications officer , the 17 paintings “are among the few in our collection that do not raise the copyright-related issues that affect so many works of modern and contemporary art.” In other words, if and when the Art Project is a clear success, the Modern will decide if it wants to spend the time and money to secure permission for Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and the like to appear on it.
This might also hold true for the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, which owns Picasso’s “Guernica,” but has so far limited its participation primarily to 13 paintings by the Cubist Juan Gris and 35 photographs from the Spanish Civil War. Needless to say, the works and galleries that each museum has selected for the first round of the Art Project makes for some interesting institutional psychoanalysis.
From where I sit Google’s Art Project looks like a bandwagon everyone should jump on. It makes visual knowledge more accessible, which benefits us all.
In many ways this new Google venture is simply the latest phase of simulation that began with the invention of photography, which is when artworks first acquired second lives as images and in a sense, started going viral. These earlier iterations — while never more than the next best thing — have been providing pleasure for more than a century through art books, as postcards, posters and art-history-lecture slides. For all that time they have been the next best thing to being there. Now the next best thing has become better, even if it will never be more than next best.
3.
This is the effect of real handmade paintings or sculpture or outsider art on me. I think I've also written about the projectile tears which shot from my eyes the first time I saw Magdalena Abakanowicz's Backs or the jacket embroidered with threads from rags unravelled in the mental institution laundry room over decades by an inmate. As a scholar of genocide art, I have seen some of the world's most graphic photographs, from Nick Ut's Pulitzer-Prize-shot of Kim Phuc to the Tuol Sleng mug shots of Cambodians with their death numbers pinned to their bare flesh, and not one of them has elicited any such reaction from me.
While photography reveals -- as Smith notably notes, teeny background skinny dippers she'd never seen before in an iconic Breughel Google now allows her to survey pixel by pixel -- things one did not know before, and it is notable according to its best philosophers for its ability to abstract and embalm its subjects (not to say inherently objectify the oppressed in a way the plastic arts, though just as patriarchal, cannot), the only impact photography has really is photographing people at the moment of their death, or embalming. A photograph is a war trophy in a way even the most swag-generated patron's painting is not.
4.
As we all know, the artist, like Picasso, who assiduously cultivates advertisements for himself, will always be successful. Picasso was also very talented. Not more so than hundreds of others who quietly kept to their studios and painted, like Bonnard. For one. What they achieve is what I can only call "immediate luminosity", which is one of James' three pragmatic criteria for judging religious ideas. Picasso, while brilliant in every way like a camera, sublime in intellectual achievement, like Spielberg/Cameron is a technical genius whose content, notoriously like that of all American movies, is conservative, if not derriere garde aesthetically (Aristotelian tragic hero values, as if history were in fact the story of 300 white guys in Paris), both appallingly simple-minded, racist and sexist (Avatar), really shockingly anti-modern and possibly fascist. Ariel Dorfman on Donald Duck? Is totally correct (one reason the po-mos flip me out: there is no moral dimension or content adjudication to their decon of pop cult).
It is supremely successful in terms of Marxist fetish commodity, but it is not only not immediately luminous, it puts out the light in the ways I've suggested.
5.
Google Art has trophy-fied the 17 works of art they chose to pixelate (Van Gogh's Starry Night, who chose?). As anybody who has actually seen the painting can tell you it is not warm and fuzzy. It is so sad you can hardly breathe, a very disturbing cold and ultimately uplifting massive presence in a room, an object completely different from the one Google has pixelated.
6.
And I think that's what Twittering, and the whole universe of soliciting microloans for starving artists is all about. Multitasking silences utterly the stream of consciousness. Out of which comes art, as we all know, as well as the discernment of the authentic.
7.
I really want not to be a curmudgeon. But I think Bill Gates has brainwashed people and now Google is defining the canon as well as the Gaze and the canonical way of looking at art. No. By God. No.
1972, Nick Ut. I own, and have read, an entire PhD. thesis on the iconographic and religious "composition" of this photograph. Like Roberta Smith says, one of photography's three magic tricks is to reveal attributes and clues which you never saw before, like the murder in Blow-up or the skinny dippers in the background of the Breughel painting. In that case, however, those elements actually exist in the universe, where as the Christian iconographic composition of this photograph is dubious in the extreme, as is any notion that Nick Ut composed it at all. He framed it, and got back to the office alive, with the undeveloped film intact, all of which deserve enormous respect. Compose? No. This is a picture of dead people.
