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

Swallowing in 1951

A cineradiograph of a typical normal barium swallow. The semi-solid meal passes over the back of the tongue, past the epiglottis and into the pharynx. Found at Wellcome Collection

The Phenomenology of Colour: What Happens When We See

From Always With Honor

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.

When the MET Gets Insecure - Baldessari's Pure Beauty Take Two

Last week I went to the Metropolitan to see the Baldessari retrospective for a second time (I first saw it at the Tate in London). The Tate had it better. Maybe because the British institution had more room, the MET show felt cluttered. But in their spatial restrictions, I was happy to see the curators presented more of the artist's earlier and less well-known work (such as Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt of 1972) rather than his 80s color dots on black and white footage. 

In their restrictions, however, they also decided on pretty much the pettiest of possible moves they could have done with Brain/Cloud (With Seascape and Palm Tree) from 2009 -  the image illustrates my post "Baldessari's Brain vs Koons's Penis". This installation is composed of a sculptural brain being filmed by a delayed low quality camera, giving the visitors the chance to see both the brain/cloud in reality and in a mediated reality themselves and the cloud/brain. For some reason - I heard rumors of weight - the MET didn't instal this work but still wanted to. Accordingly they went on presenting multiple flat large-scale reproductions of it as well as its illustration on all of the exhibit's published material.

Talk about being missing the point.

To forget how depressing it is when even the world's top museum is insecure about its collection and/or suggests a reproduction is sort of like the real when doing an exhibit on an artist who has perpetually made fun of such conventional ways of seeing:
Here is a little humor with John Baldessari's Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt from 1972: 

Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972) - Authenticity, Images, Advertising, Reproductions and Happiness

I just discovered these 1972 television treasures by John Berger.

Till now I only knew of the end result - the wonderful book "Ways of Seeing." A semi-cult read in cultural/visual studies, in it he rethinks what seeing is - what advertising does, what art means, how reproductions affect the act of seeing and the way which visibility is a subjective process. The originality is that he does this by using images, reproductions and collages as much as words and text. Similarly in the televised version of "Ways of Seeing" he uses editing techniques (as if switching channels) and particular frames (filming the film crew filming him) as much as his voice-over to get his questions across.

Here is a wonderful articulation of the absurd adoration western culture has for authenticity:

In this particular extract Berger looks at (pun intended) ideas of hyperreality and consumption in the world of advertising. At times a little simplistic (forty years have gone giving the issue a bunch of new ways to think about it) but his questions are still just as relevant today as they were 40 years ago: