Lambdaphagy

tanadrin:

argumate:

lambdaphagy:

Today I toured the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, a gallery of
boekdrukkunst set in the former workshop of the 16th century printer
and humanist Christophe Plantin.  The museum showcases work from the
9th century to the present, so you can turn a corner and pass from
illuminated medieval manuscripts to prize-winning 21st century art.

The juxtaposition is humiliating.

This post has been bugging me for a while now. There are millions of people alive today with the artistic skills to surpass the great works of antiquity, and they can share them instantly with the entire world. We’ve all scrolled past images from a student’s portfolio that would have ended up framed on a palace wall in an earlier age; now we might click like or reblog if it is particularly fetching.

With a surfeit of skill, it is the prize-winning that is the problem: the art world has spiralled off into abstract irrelevance, where concept is everything and skill no longer matters.

It’s tempting to read into this some broader narrative of social decline, but before doing that imagine looking forwards instead of backwards by bringing some medieval monks or Florentine painters to the present day. What would they think of the visual arts circa 2016? They might struggle with Picasso and Pollock, but I think their primary reactions would be holy shit you guys have photographs and oh my god the images move and dance.

If you tell the story of visual arts in the 20th century, painting barely merits a footnote. A new world opened up and whole lives were spent in obsessive exploration of its possibilities. Look to Hitchcock, look to Kubrick, hell look to Michael Bay and James Cameron even. The evolution of music videos, the rise of computer graphics in showing things that were and things that are and things that can never be. Look to app icons, not religious icons.

If you care about the craft, visit Dafen village and see the masters still at work. But if you only care about people playing status games with this medium instead of that medium, then be patient: fashion only has so many possibilities, and the pendulum will keep swinging.

In fact, the reason usually cited by art historians (AFAIK) for the high-status end of the art world spinning off into “abstract irrelevance” is that the memetic function of art has been supplanted by photography and other mechanical means of image reproduction. When you can copy an image perfectly on demand, pure technical skill is simply no longer interesting on its own–and while that may be sad, in the way an autoworker losing his job because a robot does it better is sad–I don’t think it’s actually a problem in the broader sense.

I bought the “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” argument for a long time, but now I’m not sure.  Technical skill was only a part of what visual art was about before the 19th century.  Tthe idea that the task of the artist was merely to accurately reproduce what a camera captures would have struck a lot of people as bizarre.

Exempli gratia:

(via immanentizingeschatons)