Taking Photographs in Museums (a published thesis)

In 2010 le Musée d'Orsay in Paris banned photography-taking by visitors. Targeted at visitors, French intellectuals seemed to be the most affected by this new regulation: what about the museum's mission? Didn't the collections belong to all of us? Was this to increase postcard revenues? Outraged academic blogs were uploaded, photographing mobs entered the Musée in protest and articles nervously written, but the ban is still in place and visitors continue to stretch their arms in front of Monets to photograph lily pads. Museum visits, like any 'special' event (see below the image of St Peter's Square during the Pope's election), have become fascinating instances to observe how living the experience is increasingly cohabiting with its own mediation. 

La Documentation française's recent publication Les visiteurs photographes au musée ponders about this evolution from a legal as well as anthropological and technological perspective. The "problem" isn't new. Wanting to reproduce special artifacts (like art works) is decades old (think cave-paintings and hunted animals, Roman sculptures and emperors, royal painters and kings, daguerreotypes and dead children), but till quite recently this was mostly reserved to elites and limited in production. Today, as cameras become smaller, better at capturing light in dim spaces and drastically cheaper, photography-making is a practice available to practically anyone above the age of four with a smartphone-owning parent. In the book, the editors Serge Chaumier, Ann Krebs and Mélanie Roustan brought together a multi-disciplinary bunch of researchers to think about questions like: what are the laws in place to restrict museum photographers? What are these regulations' foundations? What are the strategies museums engage in to encourage or use this growing practice? And obviously why are visitors taking photographs in the first place? 

Back in 2008 I wrote my Masters thesis about why people take photographs of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum (this has become a chapter in their book). The iphone was a few months old back then, and things have changed a whole lot since, but overall the roots of why we archive visually have not radically shifted. Through photographs we reassure ourselves that we wouldn't forget, we commodify objects or situations that may feel overwhelming, we curate ourselves for others, we gather evocative material to socialize with others, etc. What evolutions in technology have, in fact, done is affected the experience of the now, and hence the museum experience itself... What the book makes clear is that what is at stake here is finding a way to insure that the museum's mission is fulfilled with the museum's reality taken into account.

[In a similar vein I came across this video recently. It makes a good case for street fashion photography's arguable existential crisis: too many street photographers taking too many street photographs is killing the authenticity of the genre, and of the street, and of the fashion, and of the street fashion, and of all its players... argh, existential angst, where has authenticity gone?]

TAKE MY PICTURE from GARAGE Magazine on Vimeo.

Animals and Humans: What is Art, What is Beauty?

The topic and works of the Grand Palais' current exhibition seem worth a visit. Displayed slightly lower for the child in all of us, the exhibit goes over the European art scene's take on animals. In the words of the curator Emmanuelle Héran, it gathers all art depicting animals and touches upon a variety of ideas -- the cultural norms of beauty (why is a toad ugly and a horse honorable?), or the role human historical developments since the 16th c. had on our relationship to animals (for instance if during the colonial years the endless discovery of new species meant animals were symbols of bountiful imagination, today the predicament of their extinction is underlying all of their artistic portrayals). There's art, aesthetic theory, human and natural history to produce this:

Beauté animale : présentation de l'exposition by Rmn-Grand_Palais

And my favorite little creatures - birds - are represented by the iconic Dodo, whose myth is complexified here:

La véritable histoire du Dodo by Rmn-Grand_Palais

"Effectively it's a museum about everything, everywhere, ever": The New Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology and Archeology

Sylvia Plath, front-doors, humanity, Totem poles, objects made 1.8 million years ago, Captain Cook, death, sex in Ancient Rome, snakes and ladders and other things in the Cambridge University Anthropology and Archeology Museum's collections.

What in the World is Art: An Example from the Field

A few days before the 2012 Whitney Biennial opened, a web page with the museum's logo, template, language and a similar url (www.whitney2012.com instead of www.whitney.com) announced the institution's decision to give up on certain "generous corporate donations" by terminating its partnership with the Deutsche Bank and Sotheby's. According to this release by resigning from such benefits the Whitney was acknowledging and, especially displaying its role in upholding "a system that benefits collectors, trustees, and corporations at the expense of art workers" (I would add art lovers). The Whitney was taking a stance against the Deutsche Bank's corporate conduct (the bank just settled a legal dispute of $202 million for reselling knowingly shaky mortgages between 2007 and 2009) and deploring Sotheby's recent internal policies (the lock-out of its art handlers while making record profits and increasing its director's revenue from $2.4million in 2009 to $10.3 million in cash and benefits in 2011).

The world of art is a weird one that exists through the belief that certain "things" have magical-like forces over us. Often these magical qualities are explained by using intellectual concepts, discussing production prowess or expressing notions of aesthetics, while actually most of these "things with agencies" gain their aura through the tricky powers of financial markets. So for a museum to use its own existence to reveal the inner-workings of this weird cosmology - for instance museums may use artists because their sponsors need to sell things that may gain value if the museum uses this artist's work - was impressive, almost as impressive as good art. That excitement, however, lasted only until I learned the website was a hoax and experienced the Whitney biennial's overall blandness.

If that fake virtual press release was the most creative project to come out of the Biennial, I'm also excited to say that their hoax is part of a series of fake press releases and that their latest has just denounced the Whitney’s recent actual request for donations from blue-chip artists of work valued over $500,000.

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.