Posts tagged ‘Art’

February 1st, 2011

Googly Eyes For Google?

I have to admit: a little part of me was rather saddened today to see the launch of the Google Art Project.

The arguments in its favor make perfect sense, in the abstract.  It offers easy access to a lot of art, globally (or at least, for those with a good internet connection and a good computer).  In mapping galleries and providing scanning options of the space, it can help someone understand a work of art in its museum context – what works are adjacent, what surrounds it, etc. – as well as get a feeling for a place they may be planning to visit.  Providing selected works for high-definition, very detailed viewing offers some joys, too; it can be hard to see most paintings at this level of magnification while they hang on the walls of a museum.

And then there’s the broader trend: museums are digitizing their collections, developing online companion pieces to 3-D exhibitions, creating Smartphone apps, developing teaching tools, and more.  All of which – I can say unambiguously – is the right thing to do, and must be done.  The museum person and the technologist in me are in agreement on the need to embrace this challenge.

Still, I felt sad by the digital rigor mortis of this art, and those clinically captured galleries. For one thing, it’s hard to see even a small work of art effectively on a computer screen.  (In my office set-up, I have two; that is, one computer running two, new, 19″ flat panels. Even with that luxurious arrangement, I still don’t feel like it’s adequate, not least because Google compresses the viewing picture into an inset box.)  Zooming in on specific works of art shows you much detail, but you lose the three-dimensionality to which the human eye responds so well in person, as it moves back and forth between different zoom levels and focal points in nano-seconds.

You might (rightly) ask yourself whether my perspective means much, as an insider: that the value of this system is for the people who cannot get to these museums in person.  But if you are a regular museum goer, it’s hard to see this really taking the place of an in-person visit.  And if you’re not a regular museum goer, either because you don’t like museums or you don’t find art particularly stimulating … well, I just wonder how much allure – or benefit – there is to seeing works of art you probably are not familiar with as they hang in galleries you haven’t visited.  In fact at some level, this is a very elite take on the idea of accessibility: you need to be able to appreciate art in order to appreciate art in this context.

I admire Google for trying this out, just as I appreciate so many of the company’s Beta and Lab initiatives; Google has the resources to test out solutions to problems real and imagined, and I consider myself generally better off for their experiments.  Certainly the museums that participated made the right choice: why wouldn’t you want to collaborate with Google on such a project?  If it had been my client, I would surely have recommended they move ahead.  But this whole thing feels cold to me, demonstrating once again the challenge of trying to replace (or even supplement) the in-person experience of an authentic work of art with a simulation, where so much detail and context is lost.  Untangling the gordian knot of digital solutions for art museums is not going to be as simple as one slice through the center with the Google Art Project.

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Update: Also read this piece by Menachem Wecker on the Iconia blog, with other perspectives (as well as mine) on Google Art Project. Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee weighs in. ArtInfo has a piece on another company that created and deployed a similar (perhaps better) technology.

CategoryArt & Culture, Technology | Comment1 Comment »

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May 1st, 2010

Marina & William

I don’t usually write art reviews; notwithstanding my own history, it tends to be a little too close to my day job. When I do (as here), I try to skip the language of the art critic in favor of the directness of an ordinary viewer. With that introduction, let me start by sating that the Marina Abramović and William Kentridge shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) make a good pair.

I think art can serve a number of different purposes: to present a perspective on beauty; to challenge our assumptions about the world; to speak truth to power; and to make us uncomfortable,while using that discomfort to provoke other thoughts or feelings. Abramović’s art encompasses all of this. While you can concoct prurient justifications for seeing this show, I found the titillation unwarranted in the face of the art itself, both the videos of older pieces and the actual performers live in the galleries. Abramović’s works are not about the nudity; the body is just the clean canvas she uses for staging her ideas, and to great effect. Certainly, some works are more explicitly sexual, in the way that the naked human form can be implicitly sexual, but this rarely comes across as the purpose.

Discomfort is definitely the reigning sensation. It is uncomfortable to watch someone violently brush her thick hair, or to see two people sitting back-to-back (live) with their pony tails entwined, or even (in one of the more explicit videos) to see women of various ages running around in a muddy field in the rain, pulling up their skirts for the camera. In each case, however, that discomfort also translates into other feelings and ideas, about the role of the body, questions of beauty and age, of love and relationships and connectedness, and of patience.

At the same time, there is humor, too. I couldn’t help but smile sweetly at the video of Abramović and Ulay, her now-former partner and collaborator, running into each other and allowing their bodies to bounce gently backwards. There may be a serious statement here, about the impact on the body or about a certain kind of human frailty. But it is funny, to watch and to think about, and to imagine the two participants deciding to do this and film it. Likewise, one of the most uncomfortable pairings in the show is a video of Abramović writhing under a human skeleton—stationed next to a model, live in the gallery, under a skeleton (though it looked like a fake skeleton). The very presence of the skeleton suggests many things, death and decomposition among them, while the contorting, angry body underneath it creates other obvious connection, from passion to a passionate resisting of death. Yet it is also funny. We live in a culture that has so caricatured and cartooned the skeleton, from Halloween to YouTube videos, I think you cannot help but smile, even if you feel the seriousness of it. And again: the nudity here is anything but pornographic. Indeed, if the artist or the performer hadn’t been nude, it really would have felt like a joke, not an artistic statement.

The pairing with Kentridge works well. In his series of drawing-based video pieces exploring some of the terrible history of his native South Africa, the viewer is forced to confront the Apartheid-era conflict through hauntingly beautiful imagery. I think it is impossible not to be moved, because, unlike the more static figures in a traditional drawing or painting, these people come alive—and are abused, tortured, and murdered before your eyes, along with the landscape itself. Yet because this is not animation in the Disney-driven way we commonly think of it, the viewer never loses the connection to the artist, to the reality that these scenes are all hand-drawn. [Disclosure: this exhibition was organized in part by SFMoMA, a client.] Taken with Abramović, you have twin statements on aspects of the human condition, coming from different perspectives but united in the kind of truth-telling that art does so well.

The Abramović exhibition closes at the end of May, so anyone should hurry to see it. For the reader who cannot get to MoMA, some of Kentridge’s works can be found here, on YouTube.

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April 29th, 2010

Work It, Honey

One cliche about art is that the you’ll know it when you see it. The same is often said of pornography. Personally, I am much more comfortable identifying pornography. Yes, fine, snigger if you must, but I’ll stick by this statement: graphic sexual content is easier to spot. That places no moral value on either pornography or art one way or the other, only to say that with porn it isn’t that hard to decide what you’re looking at.

When the two things are potentially combined—pornographic art—does the evaluation become more complex? I might have argued yes until I read this story on law.com yesterday, about the decision by a New York State Tax Appeals Tribunal that an “exotic dancing” club should not be given an exemption to state sales taxes.

According to reporter Josh Stashenko, the “two-member Tax Appeals Tribunal held that the routines performed nude or nearly nude by dancers at the Nite Moves club near Albany were largely learned from other dancers or on YouTube and the Internet, and are not the kind of carefully arranged and practiced patterns of movement normally equated with the art of dance.” There you have it: pole dancing (presumably nude or not) does not constitute its own art form.

One might consider the case closed—and for legal purposes it probably is—but the panel also included the following statement: that for these dance maneuvers “the degree of difficulty is as relevant to a ranking in gymnastics as it is dance.” Hmmm. That actually seems to muddy the waters a bit, since there are surely some (possibly many) people who consider gymnastics a kind of art form, just as they consider ice skating and ice dancing “arts,” even while they are competitive.

Interestingly, the Tax Appeals Tribunal was overturning a lower judge’s ruling that the club deserved an exemption because the dancers’ routines were complicated, potentially dangerous, and required a great degree of skill and practice. Someone thought that pole dancing was art, and that someone was no less than a judge! Which makes it perhaps less surprising that the Tribunal also decided to distinguish this club (called “Nite Moves”) from other places such as a “‘theatre, opera house, concert hall or other hall or place of assembly for a live dramatic, choreographic or musical performance’ for purposes of the tax statute.” The Tribunal was taking no chances: not only is pole dancing not art, it is non-art form performed in a place no one goes specifically to see art.

I suppose that clients of Nite Moves might beg to differ, but I would not expect to hear from them at the club’s next appeals hearing. No doubt they’ll be too busy checking out the nude art at (tax exempt) MoMA to testify.

CategoryArt & Culture, Humor | Comment1 Comment »

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