Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "In the art world, the human search engine still rules.
For curators, the task of bringing art to Pittsburgh's galleries and museums still means traveling out of town to see it for themselves.
Face time with artwork provides a perspective that simply can't be duplicated with the internet, says Murray Horne, curator of the Wood Street Galleries in the Cultural District.
9 comments:
As much as I firmly champion the interwebs as a means of bringing cultures around the world together and bringing information to everyone's fingertips (and as much as I LIKE Google's online art gallery project) I fervently hope museums will be with us for a long long while yet. There IS something tangible about art; whether its purely visual art such as paintings and sculpture or more presentational like musical concerts and the live theatre we do. It's something you have to experience for yourself. People's descriptions can rarely do it justice and just seeing pictures, yes even HD pictures, can't hold a candle to seeing actual great artists' works in person.
I am completely with Jake. I also agree with the article's mention of the need to be in a space with the artwork and interact with it when choosing pieces for a gallery. This is similar to something that scenic designer Alexander Dodge mentioned when he visited on friday-being as busy as he is, he has to do a lot of his meetings over skype, and it can be difficult to discuss nuances or small details in his model when he is one place and the model is on the other side of a screen with the director. Face time remains crucial because seeing a piece head-on and walking around it and grasping its angles is what makes each person's reaction to a given work of art different.
I totally agree with this article especially how people have to experience the art and see the texture that the art has and other things that you can see more on a scream especially with the technology that we have now. I also feel that with the technology that is being developed and things that we don’t even know about right now this could be art. We will have a movement that technology might replace the art itself. I am sure that we will see the true art but there will also be place that have this digital art. I am excited to see where this goes in the coming years.
I agree with Jacob as well, but I commented on another one of these Google Museum articles that this can be used as a great planning technique. The MET is a great museum, but I have found it almost impossible to see all of it in one day. Some of the exhibitions are more "hot spots" that you should see if you are only going to be there for one day, and finding where those paintings are can help you pack in as much as you can. I remember running around the MET searching for a famous japanese painting of the wave, and it would have been extremely helpful to know where the things I wanted to see were.
I don't know how much this article was talking about the disappearance of museums and the experience of viewing the art online rather than in the gallery, but about the curators physically traveling to spaces to help their programing selection.
This seems a bit counter-intuitive. I'd imagine curators would know what has a buzz around it, see pictures online and in magazines and then contact the artist about a gallery showing. According to these curators all those steps are true except how they view the art, they view it in person. Which I guess makes sense: you want to see the same things your patrons are going to see. And scale can sometime be tricky. (How many times have we drawn something, dimensioned it, but not correlated that dimension to what size it actually is in the real world?)
Interesting to see that the thing-power of art (what the piece physically does to a viewer) is still part of curation, when audiences can easily get their art fix from digital sources.
This seems to be a pretty obvious assertion though. I was not under the impression that art that did not intend its self to be experienced digitally is going to lose something in the translation. art is an immediate visceral experience, and should be appreciated as such. there are many examples of three dimensional paintings, and layered ancostic paintings which are different from all distances, and angles, these things cannot be truly appreciated with out actual physical proximity.
This seems to be a pretty obvious assertion though. I was not under the impression that art that did not intend its self to be experienced digitally is going to lose something in the translation. art is an immediate visceral experience, and should be appreciated as such. there are many examples of three dimensional paintings, and layered ancostic paintings which are different from all distances, and angles, these things cannot be truly appreciated with out actual physical proximity.
I think we all are going to agree with the claims of the article, but I also feel like museums or the artists themselves need to find ways to make their artwork accessible to people over the internet or television. I don't think museums are going to vanish from the cultural vernacular, but I do think that more and more people are going to want to experience artwork over the internet. Almost all other forms of art (film, books, etc.) have found ways to adapt to the new technology, and I think visual arts are going to be doing this soon as well.
I had never truly considered the job as an art curator until reading this article and discovering how fascinating it sounds! On the topic of art only being appreciated at "face value", I agree but have to provide to concept of accessibility to the perspective. Whenever I research art, I admire and appreciate it but keep in mind that I would experience the piece completely different if I were to view it live. However, I still experience a reaction, mostly emotional, when viewing art and that still counts for something, I believe.
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