Once
upon a time, our big museums were the “quiet cars” of a fast-track
American culture industry. Like libraries, they were places where the
volume was low, the energy slow, the technology unobtrusive. You came to
them to look, to think and, in the days before museums became the prime
social spaces they are now, to be alone in a small, like-minded crowd.
You could take a little art home by hitting the postcard rack in the
gift shop. But the only way you would retain most of what you saw was by
spending time in the galleries and imprinting things on your brain.
That
model is pretty much a generational memory now. Today, millions of
people stream through major museums, filling the air with a restless
rustle and buzz. They move through galleries fast and with a new purpose
— cellphones in hand, they’re on Instagram treks and selfie hunts — and
with a new viewing rhythm: Stop, point, pose, snap. If you want, you
can even take the tour remotely, virtually, as more and more
institutions make their collections accessible on the Internet.
Accessibility
is the first and last word on the lips of museum directors. The motives
behind promoting the idea are complicated, but the basic idea is
simple: More people should be able to see more art. Who would argue? A
trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre is as close to
being a tour of the world as many of us can get. And objects that we
call art have a particular, layered charisma. Beauty of form aside, they
are carriers of values — political, spiritual and personal — through
time. They are ethics and emotions made visible, as you begin to learn
after you spend time with them.
A
question is what, exactly, in an age of expanded digital access, are
museum audiences seeing? Through electronic media — cellphone screens,
laptops, Pinterest and Skype — we can survey an extraordinary amount of
art, see how it is displayed in museum galleries, zoom in on close-up
details. But what are we missing by not putting these filters aside and
just standing in front of the thing itself?
My
own introduction to art was remote and virtual, at home as a kid,
looking through books, flipping pages, stopping when something caught my
attention. But what got me hooked were visits to museums, notably the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and seeing crucial features of art that didn’t come through in reproduction.
Scale was one. I had no idea that John Singer Sargent’s 1882 painting “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”
was as big as it was. It was as big as a room. You could walk into it.
The same with Paul Gauguin’s panoramic 1897 “Where Do We Come From? What
Are We? Where Are We Going?” In books, it was the size of a Band-Aid.
Even photographs showing people standing in front of it didn’t prepare
me for the jolt, when I saw the real thing, of feeling its size in
relation to mine.
And there was the museum’s 12th-century Catalan fresco of “Christ in Majesty With Symbols of the Four Evangelists.”
It was installed on a curved ceiling in a nichelike room so that it was
over you and around you, with Christ tipping toward you, about to crash
down. It was a thrilling sensation, untranslatable to the printed page
or an iPad screen.
Texture
didn’t fully translate in reproduction, either. My earliest memory of
the South Asian gallery isn’t so much of a figure, but of a material:
the soft, porous beige-pink sandstone of the museum’s great
first-century B.C. carving of a fertility goddess from Sanchi. The stone
seemed to swell with warmth. Beside it, other kinds of stone — the
sleek gray schist of a Gandhara bodhisattva, say — felt cold and
sealed-off.
Digital
photographs can give a sense of all this. But they can’t inspire the
urge to reach out and touch stone that’s right in front of you, to
connect with it, skin to skin. And it was textures as much as images
that first turned me on to Indian art.
Paintings
are personal documents, their surfaces as readable as diary entries.
And in some cases, the artist’s touch is clear even in reproduction.
Rembrandt’s work is photogenic that way; so is Jackson Pollock’s. In the
case of artists who made less theatrical use of paint, however,
evidence of the hand can be hard to see and only slowly revealed, as I
was reminded on a recent visit to the exhibition “Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Piero,
who lived from 1462 to 1522, was one of the most versatile Florentine
artists of his generation, sought after for altarpieces, portraits and
secular images, to each of which he brought different styles. He is best
known now for just one aspect of that output: wild and woolly
mythological scenes set in a Darwinian world of battling half-beast,
half-human creatures. The way they’re painted suits their subjects: with
a loose, expressionistic verve.
I
was less familiar with Piero’s religious paintings. Over the years, I
had passed by some in museums, only half noticing them, and seen others
in books and online. They registered in my mind as polished but somewhat
impersonal variations on standard themes, distinguished mainly by an
incidental wealth of fine realistic detail. Piero, it seemed, had
brought formal finesse to his altarpieces but left himself out.
I
had a different impression standing in front of them in Washington. For
one thing, details that I’d been able to make out only with the aid of a
zoom function online — feather-perfect birds, botanically correct
flowers, glinting gems — were now clear to the eye and not incidental at
all: They were integral to the compositions they appeared in. Piero’s
paintings were holistic in a way I hadn’t guessed from afar.
And
there, underneath the formal polish, was his hand in action. In one
area, he’s laying on color in chunky strokes, paint-by-numbers style. In
another, he’s adding thin, raised lines of highlight with a
calligrapher’s precision. Elsewhere, he’s impatiently smooshing pigment
around with his fingers. You can’t see all of this by standing directly
in front of a picture. You have to move around, adjust your position,
bend down and look up, catch the surface in different angles of light.
In other words, to see a painting, you have to do a little dance with
it, and take your time. From a digital distance, you see an image. In
person, in a gallery, you feel that image breathing.
And a gallery has a life of its own. A recent scientific study
published in the journal Acta Psychologica suggests that people enjoy
art more and remember it longer when they see it “live” in museums, as
opposed to online.
We
don’t need science to tell us why this might be. Museums, like churches
and libraries, are designed to enhance specific activities — praying,
reading, looking — through the manipulation of architecture, lighting,
object placement and ritualized behavior. Very different designs — from
the processional layout of the Metropolitan Museum to the labyrinthine
tangle of the new Fondation Louis Vuitton art center in Paris — can be equally effective. And some don’t work.
The
Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection galleries are boxy, white,
workaday, with art lined up on the walls, shopping mall style. The
arrangement is low on art-viewing ambience but turns out to be — who
knew? — unusually well suited to selfies. In general, MoMA is
encouraging the picture-taking impulse. The institution’s current
performance-oriented programming, notably its Björk retrospective,
accommodates digital spectacle that will, in turn, encourage digital
consumption.
But
what, in the context of virtual art viewing, becomes of work that can’t
be captured on camera, art that is resolutely unspectacular, even
materially disembodied, as was the case with early Conceptualism and
some of its offshoots? In the 1960s, the artist Robert Barry created an installation
consisting entirely of radio waves in an otherwise empty gallery. What
made such work art was the fact that it was in a gallery. And for a full
experience of it, you had to be in the gallery, too, to feel what was
or wasn’t there, to feel not-thereness, or fullness, depending on your
take.
This
is a kind of art that couldn’t be photographed in its day, or digitally
recorded or live-streamed in ours. It resists visual access. And in the
present era of saturation marketing and inescapable surveillance, it
may be that one of art’s most radically self-sustaining moves will be to
go increasingly for inaccessibility, to find ways to exist beyond the
point at which digital media can fully capture it.
Such
art already exists in museums, often in solid, traditional forms. Among
other examples, I’m thinking of certain paintings by the artist Agnes
Martin. Most of her abstract pictures over a long career were variations
on a single visual theme: an allover grid set on a plain one-color
ground. In many paintings, the grid was reduced to evenly spaced
horizontal bands. In some, the configuration consisted of nothing more
than graphite pencil lines across a white-painted canvas. Hand-drawn,
these lines have a slight, fine, personalizing tremor, enough to justify
Martin’s assessment of her art as Abstract Expressionism, not
Minimalism or hard-edge painting.
I recently sat in on a scholarly panel discussion
of her work. In the course of the evening, one of her graphite-drawn
paintings was projected in a PowerPoint display onto a large screen,
and, to all appearances, there was nothing there: just an unmarked white
square. The drawn lines were too faint to be seen. Visibility was
always a problem with Martin’s art. Some of it was almost impossible to
photograph and reproduce in print. It occurred to me that evening that
this may be one reason her art hasn’t been much talked about since her death in 2004. In a digital age, it has disappeared.
