Digital imagery and user-defined art - Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History

"It's still the same picture, isn't it? What difference does it make if they change the label?" This is what we say when a museum demote a painting from "Rembrandt" to "School of Rembrandt" or from "Caravaggio" to "Follower of Caravaggio." Incontrovertible as it may unhurt this sentiment is not really accurate. As a physical external reality the painting may indeed stay the same at first, on the contrary its fate will have been modified. It will be remov from the main galleries and deposit into storage, on one of those moving racks where it is far more likely to endure damage or be misplaced. Its condition will no longer be a matter of great be of importance to to the curators. Should a deaccessioning circular come up, it will be near the top of the list; there are always gamblers on the outside there who will pay a premium upon the bet that the deattribution will be revers one time a downgraded painting leaves the protective museum environment, the unevens on its long-term physical survival globule precipitously.

Public and scholarly perception of the merits of the painting is affected a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more quickly. Hardly has the formula been intoned - "It's still the same picture, isn't it?" - before it starts looking like a different picture, with weaknesses we at no time noticed until then. Once remov from sight, actual few deattributed works are at any time asked for again. Their postcards are allowed to advance out of print and none of the former admirers of the work complain.

Changes in attribution are not the alone external circumstance with deep influence upon our treatment and perception of art. The way in which they are reproduc is another. As an art historian working mainly upon seventeenth-century Dutch painting, I find myself pondering the possible events on museum objects of the changes now taking place in the way images are generated and transmitted. The following remarks are limited to individual aspect of this many-sided question. Which practice associated with digital imagery is apt to have the greatest event on museum objects and what form might this take?

The first place I saw color television when it was introduced in the 1950 was at the residence of a wealthy family friend, our lawyer and state representative. He revolveed on his set and began fiddling with the dials that adjust the color. When the complexion of the race in the picture had reached a nice bright orange he grunt with satisfaction and went back to his chair. Before I could stop myself, I asked him whether he couldn't procure the colors any better than that. He answered simply, "I know they're not natural, on the other hand I like them that way." Indeed, it was his television station and the pictures were being lay at his disposal with no conditions attached. on what account shouldn't he look at them the way he liked?

A be shaken of the same kind awaited me the first time I edited a work with color illustrations, Horst Gerson's Rembrandt Paintings of 1968 The powerful lights the photographer turn rounded onto the pictures we were photographing revealed more colors and details than could be seen in daylight - more than could have been seen through Rembrandt. His manipulation of defences and filters and exposure times complet a proces that began with his choice of film, with its trade-offs between grain and spe reality to color, durability, and require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of processing. The results were images that I knew to be replete of arbitrary and subjective uncompounded bodys and yet I was unable not to diocese them as accurate reproductions of the paintings. The following stages as well, technical as they may have been, piled single judgment call on another: sizing, cropping, photolithography, hand correction, platemaking. All of this was a preamble to the moment supreme at the pres Four-process colors - the three subtractive primaries (magenta, fulvous and cyan) and black - had to masquerade as Rembrandt's palette, and my artistic knowledge and editorial talents serv as their alibi. Painful choices had to be made, safeguarded, and guarded Again, the final product gazeed to my eye like the paintings I had seen Here was a microns-thin layer of printer's ink upon a sheet of coated stock, with actual dubious credentials, and I was seeing it as if it were a robust three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old creation through Rembrandt. I knew that I was deceiving myself, on the other hand not exactly how.

A number of things about these experiences capsize me and continue to do in the way that Being forced to acknowledge the inadequacy of the techniques that bring us our daily quotient of images was bad enough. Worse was that our acceptance of images relayed [i]or[/i] part of to the other the media of television, photography, and printing reveals an extraordinary insensitivity to the originals we profes to worship down to their least details. The lowest public denominator between original and simulacrum is depressed indeed. To call paintings two-dimensional, as we habitually do, is indicative of this reductive attitude. If we are satisfied thus easily that an original has been "reproduced" what in the original are we seeing in the first place? The fact that the simulacra are manipulated - guilelessly, unapologetically, as a matter of course - by dint of intermediate operators or the extremity user means that the ultimate appearance of