A recent article in the New York Sun describes a Flickr-based project called “Impressions of MoMA” or iMOMA, in which photos of the MOMA’s collection have been gathered together–150,000 items not counting the video and film libraries. Started last August by brothers Travis and Brady Hammond, iMOMA now includes 11,000 photos taken by over 2,000 individuals. “With mobile phones, everyone is an artist,” Brady Hammond said. “It would be the ultimate postmodern gallery.”
While iMOMA is conceptual, po-mo and wikified fun, it is just a more organized version of what is happening everywhere. Too many people busy capturing images rather than really looking, loading up on snapshots rather than the experience itself. Bad copies of copies, thumbnails as stand ins (this blog and others are full of postage stamp-sized versions of images that serve as a type of visual tagging system), the general proliferation of clones–this revolution has happened in other fields as well, most notably music. While the intellectual property issues in the visual arts are not trivial, they are of less concern to me than a metaphysical one–the distancing taking place between an object with artistic intentions and the recipient, or viewer.
The art I hold in highest regard demands full immersion, which requires a face to face, in the flesh experience. While some argue that the concept of an “original” is quaint and out of step with a new media cyberdized world, I have felt the energy field that surrounds some works, an aura that cannot be captured or simulated regardless of how high tech your device may be. I’d guess most of us agree that there are several categories of human experience that will never be fully simulated. Sex and art both depend on an exchange of energy to be successful and meaningful, and no cell phone can bring me the full body experience I’ve had standing in the Rothko Chapel or the Dia: Beacon’s Agnes Martin gallery.
So isn’t this best cast as a both/and? It is exciting to see new forms like iMOMA bubble up. But making art into a fun and entertaining card game is no replacement for the pilgrimage.
A friend and I were walking along the dike, looking at the mountains, the slews, the winter vegetation, the play of light. Many people we passed were taking pictures with their cell phones with great intentness. Is capturing phenomena more of value than soaking it up at leisure? I agree with your statements in this blog and must add self-immersion in experiences is superior to collecting them, in my opinion.
Self-immersion in experiences. Great way to capture it the spirit of what this means.
I see it as symptomatic of the period we live in, were everything must be documented or it will not excist “for real”. “I think therefore I am” turned into “I’m on camera, therefore I am”. It’s like an experience in itself is not enough… Maybe we are afraid of forgetting, or of being forgot – an extension to the fear of death…
This is a very important topic, one that plays up how much overload there is — as if we didn’t know. Very few people in search of a cultural experience have real leisure in any significant amount. The free afternoon with nothing to do but wander a museum till closing time, thinking all those thoughts that range from the inane to the life-changing, seems to be going the way of the rotary phone. Instead of being forced by this to carve out little intervals of time for such pursuits — if they are sufficiently important to us — we go in for a system for vacuuming up culture and filing away the precious crumbs for further perusal, when there is time. We think this will aid memory, like a scrapbook. But it won’t do that, for the memories thus formed are not memories of the experience of art, but of the frenzy of image capture.
Decades ago there was an exceptionally funny cartoon in the New Yorker — by William Hamilton, I think. A middle-aged woman is telling her peers, “Actually, it was a disappointing trip, but the photos came out beautifully, so it’s okay.” Who would have then thought she portended the shape of things to come?
Do you know of the studies done on children whose lives are so crammed with play dates and activities that they have no blocks of unstructured time? The contention is that the absence of interstitial slots of “downtime” is harmful to a child’s sense of him/herself, creativity, personal identity and other developmental issues. Seems related to this issue as well.