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computerizing the
art experience
by Jed Perl
Art addicts, computer nerds, and anybody
who's interested in art-and-technology took
notice a couple of years ago when Bill
Gates bought Leonardo da Vinci's Codex
Leicester for $30.8 million. Now the
American Museum of Natural History has
announced that next fall it will exhibit
the 72-page manuscript that contains
drawings on topics from hydrodynamics to
astronomy, along with interactive computer
displays designed to explicate Leonardo's
mirror writing and scientific ideas.
At a time when works of art are turning up
on home computer screens just as fast as
computer screens are turning up in museums,
it's generally agreed that there's some mad
logic to the Microsoft czar's eagerness to
snare the last privately owned manuscript
by the most technologically savvy aesthete
that the world has ever known. Although the
Codex Leicester, scientific in nature,
isn't exactly a work of art, I think it's
fair to point out that there's an emerging
art-and-computers gestalt, and that
masterpieces that we prize for their
uniqueness and magical immediacy are
becoming hot currency in a worldwide
information system.
Bill Gates himself is busy acquiring
reproduction rights for his Corbis
Corporation, which has entered into
agreements with the National Gallery in
London and many other institutions, to
provide international distribution for
works in their collections. The crowds that
find our museums turning into pressure-
cooker experiences may wonder if they're
not better off buying the CD-ROM, and
looking at Cézanne or Vermeer in the
relative peace of their own homes. They
better think again.
Inveterate optimists may imagine that we're
near achieving instant access to the
masterpieces in the museums. But the
difference between a work of art and a
reproduction is absolute. The computer
screen captures some of the feel of
brilliantly colored painterly paintings by
Rubens or Monet, but it turns a Rembrandt
into a black hole and the matte surface of
a fresco into shiny plastic. There's an
irrefutable logic to reproducing oil paint
on canvas with printer's ink on paper--the
materiality of the original is respected. A
computer screen gives works of art the same
weightless, disembodied feel that artists
and art historians have long decried in
color slides, and having come to accept
slides as a necessary evil we are under no
obligation to be less critical of the
computer screen.
Scholars are going to benefit from CD-ROM
catalogues of the great collections. And
the school kid who goes on line may stumble
on some art reproductions, feel an
immediate attraction, and head for the
museums--where permanent installations, far
less crowded than the special exhibits, are
still the place to go. Obviously, we all
want to give people the maximum amount of
information, but it does seem that when
technological considerations dominate, art
is all too often regarded as a matter of
education rather than experience.
Nobody gives any thought to what
"interactive"--the adjective of the moment-
-means in the museum context. The Micro
Gallery, which opened last fall at the
National Gallery in Washington, has been
described as "the most comprehensive
interactive, multimedia computer system in
an American art museum." The selling point
with all the new interactive material is
that the images will change whenever you
want them to, but what on earth does that
say about looking at a painting, which
simply hangs on a wall?
Masterpieces extend our imaginative reach.
The artist dreams up a universe and we
dream ourselves into it. In a sense we're
reinventing the painting as we react.
There's no way that the new computer
programs are going to prepare you for this
kind of experience, because clicking on an
icon has nothing to do with letting your
mind zoom into a mysteriously interactive
mood.
Even people who can't define authenticity
can feel its attraction, which is part of
what pushes museum attendance into the
stratosphere. Although Bill Gates is the
showman who bought the Codex Leicester,
it's Leonardo's show. This High Renaissance
master is the father of all techo-nerds,
but when you're looking at one of his
drawings--even if it's just a diagram--you
know perfectly well that you're not on the
information highway. It's a clarifying
experience. Nobody is ever going to pay $30
million for last year's CD-ROM, and that
would be true even if there were only one
copy left.
Jed Perl is the art critic for The New
Republic. This essay appeared in slightly
different form on the Op-Ed page of the New
York Times.
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