Walter's Idea, Google's Project and a few (elitist) thoughts

In the 1930s a man called Walter predicted that as technologies of reproduction would expand, the aura of art would wither. So much so that with everyone owning a version of the Mona Lisa, art (as a Bourgeois elitist enterprise) would not longer exist. Walter was a marxist with big ideals. And obviously in today's context of Picassos selling for billions and every cellphone including lenses, he could very easily be discarded as have been heavily mistaken. Yet he's cited by everyone everywhere, and it is not only his terms that are used and quoted but his actual motivations and beliefs - as Google has shown with their new Art Project.

It's a website where Google has scanned in very very high resolution amazingness with high tech machines greatness some important museums' collections and spaces. This is how the employees of Google describe their aspirations with the Art Project: "It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close."

Isn't the trust of Walter and of Google employees in visual reproductive technology and imagery not only as enabling larger access to more people but also better access to more people stunning? And I don't disagree. I myself enjoyed going through the halls of the Prado (that I've never been there) - although got fed up quickly - and I've never seen a Van Gogh brushstroke quite like that before. But who cares? The people who don't have access to museums, those mentioned by Google's art loving employees? There's a cultural capital to quote Bourdieu in wanting to see art which I fear will exclude many. However in the cultural capital there is also a behavioral protocol in experiencing art, that the Art Project dissolves entirely. Indeed if one thing is for sure is that the Art Project versus the Museum experience is like facebook or porn versus stalking an ex-boyfriend's house or the actual sexual act - there's not pressure to perform a proper social behavior. Although, honestly museums have done a great job at making record entries, and adding restaurants, stores and lounge-like areas to make their spaces more accessible in recent years. So was it necessary? Some even complain about the dumbing down, the infotainment of contemporary museums and exhibitions.

Furthermore seeing art frontally isn't what art is all about, truthfully. Zooming on the skull of the Ambassadors is one thing, but unable to position oneself differently to ultimately see the perspectival trick that made the painting famous is another. Furthermore excluding all the other senses that are at play in the museum space and that are so fundamental to their 'artness' again seems like reducing art quite dramatically. The anthropologist Contance Classen might even say that the Art Project is the latest in Modernity's plan to make everything appear most real when rationally organized in an ocular-centric way (versus multi-sensorially experienced). For example, how about the clinical cleanliness of the Louvre, the decaying ceilings of the Hermitage (that clash with the Matisses so wonderfully), the over heating and noise of the MoMA and the Tate Modern's unique smell of humidity that are such fantastic ways to think about objects and their agency over people's actions.

This might sound elitst, but the Art Project seems to be far from a generous act but rather a marketing coup for Google to gain cultural (capital) credit.

Post ArtFair Thoughts: The Difference between Priceless Art and the Commodification of Art into a Buyable Brand

Commodification 101: Haring Chocolat at Le Bon Marché

I was working at Toronto Art, an art fair, last week and was reminded - yet again - the uneasiness that emerges whenever art and monetary worth start mingling. As if the price of artistic objects was either intrinsically random or totally unable to capture its 'auratic' value.

But while the worth of art is an uneasy business for some art fair visitors, mass consumption culture has very good at making sure art's aura would be made (more) accessible and (very much) acceptably buyable.

In an article entitled "Consuming Caravaggio" (2006) Kent Drummond traces the migration of Caravaggio’s art from a small elite's secret to mass market knowledge. In order to develop how the public-at-large has come to know Caravaggio and experience the Caravaggio brand he divides the process into three ‘portals:’ the ‘appropriation’ of the artistic work by a limited group (like the Damien Hirst sale); the ‘commercialization’ of the oeuvre in which promotion and distribution activities broaden the scale of the audience and “lower its symbolic capital” (think the Basquiat movie or blockbuster MoMA exhibitions) and finally the ‘commodification’ portal which, with greater advertising, graphics and fashion engenders Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and idea that the 'image is all'.

Indeed in his book Simulations (1983) Baudrillard sums up the idea of commodification as “the creation and consumption of a system of objects by which the consumer can define him/herself at a profoundly superficial level. Here one doesn’t buy a t-shirt; one lives the lifestyle.” The process is the epiphany of “hyper-reality:” when ‘real’ identities are fully based on referents that have been totally dissolved in the mechanisms of capitalism.

Recently Montreal's Ogilvy's windows displayed Otto Dix reproductions with its fall mannequins. Slightly awkward this example of commodification is simultaneously an attempt to promote a slightly obscure artist's show in a museum that needs coolness and a fancy commercial department store trying to align its own products with those coined art. Dix's ideas are diluted, as his work is used for its aura - or lifestyle it is associated to (cultured wealthy bourgeois) - more than anything else. 

Commodification 102: Otto Dix is Fall Fashion at Montreal's Ogilvy's

I think the uneasiness of having an event dedicated to the pricing of art lies in that art supposedly implies the viewer/consumer questions the objects' value, aesthetic, discourse, aura, whereas brands and stores will never invite one to ask questions - either buy or don't, either own or don't, either identify or don't. With art there is a precarious midway: art invites to stand, look, wait, ponder, judge, attempt to understand.  And this flux state engendered by a supposedly priceless object (an art object) can only have a socially acceptable price tag when it has been transformed/commodified, or in Baudrillard's terms liquidated of meaning, when it takes the form of a chocolate box or background for mannequins wearing Fall's styles. 

Quotes: Smith, Terry. “Production.” Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff ed. Critical Terms for Art History, Second Edition. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003. 376

Jeff Koons' penis vs. John Baldessari's brain: what does it take for the 'what is art' question to be successfully conveyed?

Curious to compare the National Gallery's Pop Life: Art in a Material World exhibit to the one presented last October in the Tate Modern, I accidently ended up in Ottawa on Canada Day. Both in the UK and in Canada, Pop Life was, and remains, a blockbuster success.

If there are a few differences - particularly in Canada, the sad spacial absence marking the controversy around Richard Prince's photograph of young Brooke Shields' nude and the unnecessary addition of a room thought-out by so-called genius concept Reena Spaulings but based on a notion articulated better by others fifty years ago (see Nouveau Realist Daniel Spoerri in particular) - both exhibits are a shiny clutter of recognizable works, names, ideas, shows, things, accessories and humor by Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol's disciples (Haring, Basquiat, etc) and Andy Warhol's sons (Hirst, Koons, etc).

This success is obviously tied to the overt and cool 'contentious' issues that are embedded in the show's premise: Brillo Boxes (courtesy Warhol) and a calf in formaldehyde (courtesy Hirst) question art with an 'ironic' regard Mona Lisa incontestably can't. However how does this type of art get to be such a success when similar contentious questions have also been tackled by artists without the clunky use of their penis stuck in La Cicciolina waxed asshole (courtesy Koons)?

When I saw Pop Art at the Tate Modern, the neighboring temporary exhibition was a retrospective, John Baldessari Pure Beauty. After the bustling business and literal heat of the Pop Art rooms, John Baldessari's space was strikingly different - it was empty. Better to contemplate his thoughtful yet biting career of videos, words, canvases, collages and a final installation (see photo above) subtly questioning the nature of our contemporary human condition, the difference of public interest between both shows was a sad nod to what Pierre Bourdieu hoped for: the opening up of museums. Indeed in the 60s this French sociologist observed the exclusion of people lacking a cultural capital, and invited museums to democratize their spaces with better formulated labels, programs, visits, relaxed atmospheres, cheaper entrance fees, etc...

Ideally I'm all about this, I think art can be a powerful force to question our own assumptions on reality. Practically, though, exhibitions that are public successes seem to require the straightforward 'irony' and (at this point) boring 'controverse' of Warhol and this results in people like Jeff Koons and Cosey Fanni Tutti imposing their wet dreams to my face in the name of 'irony', 'mockery' and 'art.'

I believe in Baldessari. (the MET is opening his retrospective next October).