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August 11, 2007
Art in an Age of Digital Reproduction
I recently went to the Art Institute of Chicago to see the Jeff Wall show. I’d seen some of his photographs in the newspaper, but I wasn’t buying the critical praise. Nevertheless, I was discouraged by the mob scene in the other galleries and decided to give him a chance.
I’m glad I did. One of his pieces, Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), struck me as a Dulce et Decorum Est for our time. The visual monotony of a desert landscape and dull Russian officers’ uniforms is relieved only by gore and improbably animated faces, some laughing profanely, others enigmatically contemplating their fate. The startlingly inventive “Flooded Grave” (above) is set in a drab cemetery and features an open, water-filled tomb filled with a riotously colorful array of sea anemones and urchins. All the work was backlit, achieving a luminosity no printed page (or monitor I've seen) can convey.
Which brought me back to my initial lack of enthusiasm for Wall’s work. Did the newspaper copy mislead me? Would thumbnails on the web have done the same thing? I’m not necessarily attacking mechanical reproduction for damaging the (here quite literally) auratic quality of the art itself. I’m just wondering about the extent to which an artist might want the power to stop inferior copies of his or her work, if only to avoid misimpressions like mine.
On the other hand, I’d never have even gone to the show if I hadn’t seen the reproductions in the New York Times article on Wall. So I'm not sold on the need to, say, expand moral rights so as to permit artists to assure that only those appreciating the "real presence" of the work itself can see any copy of it. After all, even an in-person visit is no guarantee of respect:
Foreign correspondent Jim Biederman reports from a cell phone inside the Louvre, in front of the Mona Lisa, on what people say while they're standing in front of some of the world's greatest works of art. It turns out to be pretty banal. People talk about dinner. And the price of the paintings. It actually makes you feel bad for artists. . . . After all, it takes years to develop artistic skills; it's intensely competitive; almost no one makes any money doing it; there are jealousies and unfair treatment; and then, if somehow, your work is recognized, and you end up in a museum like the Louvre, you're even treated badly there.
Even as art critics ask us to "sort through both the vivid details and the underlying layers of meaning, intention and process," crackberry culture pulls us away.
Posted by Frank Pasquale at August 11, 2007 04:15 PM
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Comments
Nice Walter Benjamin reference.
Posted by: Aaron at August 12, 2007 11:32 PM
