The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

The Musée d’Orsay is one of the world’s great museums – it houses the “L’origine du monde” by Courbet, the “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” of Manet, some fantastic art nouveau furniture – to name only my favorites. I guess I have a penchant for incongruously naked ladies.

Anyway, after having enjoyed great exhibits in Berlin (“Die Kunst ist Super!”), at the Cluny in Paris, and so on, I visited the Orsay during one of the busiest times of the year – just after Christmas. I have a bachelor’s degree in art history, which, while not all that impressive in the real world, at least established in me an appreciation of art and a solid grounding in its history (duh!). I am also a tourist-hater. I don’t hate tourism per se, but rather detest the stupid things that tourists do. Why did you bring a baby to the Louvre? Seriously, why?

This collection of facts sets up my main point – the Orsay, being overrun with ignorant tourists all jostling for a glimpse at van Gogh’s self-portrait, because it’s famous and recognizable and pretty, was the site of one of the most nauseating demonstrations of the effects of modern digital culture I have yet seen. Social networking? Great. Party photos? Fine. Digital retouching? Whatever. But everyone – and I do mean an overwhelming majority of the spectators – were shooting digital photos of all the most famous paintings. And I had to ask myself – why?

I mean, I’m sure that in the days before digital photography, people took photos of paintings in museums to show to their friends and put in their boring slide-shows, but I did the whole European tour thing before digital cameras were big and I can’t remember anything like this. Moreover, people have to do that whole idiotic-looking, no-viewfinder thing with their cameras – where they hold it up several inches from their faces and peer into the screen. Hey, everybody! You look stupid!

So, the first questions: Why the hell do you want a crappy digital photo of a painting when you can get a nice postcard in the gift shop? Or an exhibition catalogue? And who wants to see your photos of a van Gogh painting anyway? Your Facebook friends? Doubtful. Is it just to prove that you were there?

I think that it is, in part, a way for people to prove that they did something (anything!) and to show their friends the cool things that they saw on their trip. And when one is traveling, this is not at all a bad motivation. I get it. But I think that the second aspect of the phenomenon indicates that for people who don’t know much about art and therefore gravitate towards things that they recognize, taking photos gives them something to do with their hands. That is to say, unsure of how to appreciate a painting or to enjoy it, they demonstrate, both to themselves and others, that they are really looking at it. By shooting it with their camera – while looking through the screen. I’m not putting down the unwashed masses here – American education, for instance, is woefully lacking in classes on art, art appreciation, or art history. So how can we expect most people to really know art or to develop personal tastes and interests? I could go on, but I think the action speaks largely for itself.

Finally, and perhaps this point is overdetermined and needs little exposition from me, people are using digital cameras to look at paintings THROUGH A SCREEN. Have we reached a point in computer culture or the digital age or whatever where people can only use their visual capacities when looking through a screen? A TV screen? An iPhone screen? A computer screen? A screen is called a screen for a reason – it means “a barrier.” And yes, it has been adopted to mean, originally, a surface for projection of images, and later for the display of images from an internal source – but any screen, whether receiving a projected image or projecting a digital image, reduces the amount of visual information received by the eye. So anyone looking at a painting through a digital camera (or a digital photo) is getting far less visual information than from direct looking. Have we all become Proust’s Marcel, our visual world a place of sensory overload, using our cameras like his screening fingers to shut out some of the beauty of the hawthorns? If only it were that poetic.

Sick, people. Sick.

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