The State of the Industry

originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
But you're forgetting that Nusch left Eluard for Man Ray... oh, wait, that was Gala who left him for Max Ernst. Nix that.

More seriously, to a certain extent there isn't as much physicality to photographs, no? Or perhaps the grain, the live texture of older ones?
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They were definitely into appropriation, of each other's mates.

Definitely less physicality to photographs, but emulsion seem to give them a subtle but significant materiality that today's iris prints, ink jets and laser prints don't seem to have. The latter have become 100% image, and feel to me comparatively impoverished.
 
Oswaldo, don't you ever dust these things off?
Manray-1-1.jpg
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
If by high quality reproductions we mean photographic reproductions, they may be capable of reproducing the image extremely well, but never the materiality, so they will always be inadequate to the task.
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This is fairly obviously circular. The question isn't whether they reproduce the materiality but whether the materiality as materiality is essential or even part of an aesthetic apprehension of the painting. I'm not sure this question should have meaning to Oswaldo who does not believe that there is such a thing as an aesthetic apprehension per se and who therefore has no real basis for judging between whether the simulacrum and the original are the same, or different or whether it is even worth talking about that, but that's another argument. With regard to this one, unless one thinks that it is part of the painting to be touched so that its texture can be felt, than a photographic reproduction that created the precise visual sensations of the original (theoretically possible, whether or not it is yet technically, and even more theoretically possible given the well-known ability of new modes of reproduction to cause confusion with reality before their means become habitual to us)would be as aesthetically valuable as the original.

Yes, some artworks will be harder than others to reproduce. Statues would have to be reproduced as statues and not merely photographed for full apprehension (though photographs even of them, enhanced by our perceptual abilities to fill out two dimensional images into three dimensional ones are better than I think Oswaldo asserts). Even this used to be more typical. Before museum curation entailed only exhibiting originals or something of worth as its own object, they typically displayed reproductions of important artworks so that they would be available to the local population. If you can get to the basement of the Chicago Art museum, I've been told, you can see a roomful of things like scale reproductions of the Belvidere Apollo that it once displayed.

But some artworks reproduce perfectly--prints of a negative for instance, separate versions of a film and of course different printings of a poem. That which is true of some artworks actually is true of all artworks theoretically. Read Benjamin on Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which is nostalgic for aura but knows what has happened to it nevertheless.

To the extent that Jeff was talking only about expense as a barrier, however, I want to withdraw my opposition on reflection. There is some expense, greater or lesser, entailed with many if not most artworks. Music reproduction hasn't eliminated the preferability of live concerts and while those are widely and inexpensively available, they aren't everywhere and free. Even the local museum may be hard to get to and expensive if you are at certain income levels. And the training to appreciate generally bears the cost of a liberal arts education (generally, not always) which makes even Melville more expensive at first than even a 47 Cheval Blanc.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg: And the training to appreciate generally bears the cost of a liberal arts education (generally, not always) which makes even Melville more expensive at first than even a 47 Cheval Blanc.
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Well you're now doubling back on yourself because we all know how much time/money and investment it requires to appreciate certain wines. They may provide pleasure on multiple levels, but so does Moby Dick.
 
Materiality is important to me, Jonathan, so I find anything that gives me image without materiality to be deficient. I believe in esthetic apprehension (as a culturally subjective experience) and created a place for people to have whatever kind esthetic apprehension they wish, even the naive kind that believes in inherent quality. There is no need to touch a painting in order to appreciate its texture. There is no method of reproduction of a painting that captures its texture. If you're content with the superficiality of a high quality reproduction, be my guest.
 
Jonathan - Reproductions of famous works was quite common in many museums. Harkens back to an earlier time when the nobility of art was seen differently, also when museums were more than just for looking, but were also places for propspective painters and sculptors to go to imitate -- which one still sees occasionally at some museums such as the Met and the Louvre.

Not all would agree that the live musical performance is better than the studio. Certainly, Glenn Gould, who extensively reworked his performances, wouldn't have. And would Flagstad's 1952 Tristan and Isolde have been better or worse without the assists from Schwarzkopf?

I think I may have posted this here before, but an interesting series of meditations by Errol Morris on the Vermeer fakes that the experts didn't want to believe were fake. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/bamboozling-ourselves/. In his epilog, he had this interesting observation:

An Experiment

Imagine that you could build a 3-dimensional copier. And could copy The Girl with the Pearl Earring atom by atom, molecule by molecule, such that there would be no way to distinguish between the two. Would I then have the same painting? The answer is: NO. The two paintings have a different provenance, and that provenance is crucial to understanding what makes a work of art what it is. One painting has a provenance going back to Vermeer, the other has a provenance going back to the 3-dimensional copier.

Furthermore, if the painting was not painted by Vermeer, if it doesnt have that causal connection with the hand of Vermeer, then it doesnt matter what it looks like. Vermeer could have produced a truly atrocious painting, but if it is he who painted it, then it is a Vermeer, regardless of what it looks like. Van Meegeren was aware of this. All you have to do is point to the forgery and say, Its a Vermeer, then perhaps point to a signature, and the viewer does the rest of the work.

Now for the surprise. There is no need to build a 3-dimensional copier even if it were possible. Han van Meegeren has conducted the experiment for us in a much more clever fashion. There is NO difference between The Supper at Emmaus, before and after it was identified as a modern forgery, and yet it was seen in different ways. Only our beliefs about it have changed.

Philosophers have wrestled with questions about belief, sense, meaning, and reference, as well as identity. Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), a philosopher and logician who straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, famously asked questions about the Morning Star and the Evening Star. In the essay On sense and reference (ber Sinn und Bedeutung) published in 1892, he gives an argument to show that sense and reference are distinct. Think about the phrase The Morning Star. Now think about The Evening Star. Do they have the same sense or the same meaning? No. But it turns out The Morning Star refers to the same thing (namely, the planet Venus) as The Evening Star. The reference is the same, although the sense (or the meaning) is different. In an unusual twist, it could be argued that The Supper at Emmaus has a different sense before and after it was unmasked as a forgery, even though it is the same painting. And has the same reference.

Similarly, the Supper at Emmaus when attributed to Vermeer has a (imagined) provenance going back to Vermeer, the Supper at Emmaus when attributed (correctly) to Van Meegeren has a new and different provenance, and hence we see it differently. It means something different to us. The reader might ask, Are you suggesting that Freges sense is analogous to your provenance? My answer is: Yes.

Even if the chemical composition is the same, that doesnt mean that the paintings have the same provenance, the same history. Gring knew this. And that is why he insisted (within two years) on having Van Meegeren reveal the name of the family selling the Vermeer, Christ and the Adulteress. He was concerned about the provenance of the painting.
 
Claude,

One of the reasons for reproductions in museums was so that everybody in Chicago could "see" the important works of art, although no doubt they were there also for artists to learn from copying, an interesting concept its own right.

The fact that a painting was painted by Vermeer--its provenance--is important for numbers of reasons, but none of them aesthetic. Oswaldo doesn't believe in aesthetic theories except to dismiss them as naive, but, art auctioneers to the contrary notwithstanding, both aesthetic theories that believe that artworks have objective evaluations and those that don't tend to come together to agree that their value is in their arrangement of sense apprehension. This has always had as a consequence that their provenance was strictly irrelevant to their aesthetic quality or even mere effect. It's what Kant meant when he said that taste was indifferent even to the existence of the object, what Hegel meant when he attributed beauty to a twice-born creation of the spirit, what Arnold meant when he said that poetry would survive religion because it placed its value only in the idea, what Pater meant when he said that the importance of art was the sense impression it created on each of us...and one could go on and on.

My more controversial claim of course was that the reproduction doesn't even have to be very exact. But if you think about all the bad reproductions you see that do give you workable knowledge of the works, you will see how high our tolerance is.

Glenn Gould preferred recordings because he could get better control of his performance, not because he thought the aural effect of recordings was better for the listener (also because he was loony). If he could have created a way for a perfect performance to recreate the exact aural effect of a live performance, I'm sure he would have. We do approach that, but for a lot of money, more than it takes to go to a concert. But this seems to be making my point about reproductions so I'm happy to concede your claims.
 
Jonathan -- I don't necessarily endorse Morris's point of view, but think it is interesting and put it out there for that. I do strongly believe that context is an element that cannot be ignored in aesthetic appreciation, and one can make the argument that provenance is an important element of context (sometimes yes, sometimes no, think I). Transposing to a different area for comparison, reading the same piece of literature from a worn-and-torn used paperback, reading it online, reading it from a first edition, reading it aloud (does anyone remember Roger Shattuck?), etc. can all be very different experiences.

One more commentary on live vs. recorded -- sitting in venue where there are bad acoustics and people talking (and sometimes even smoking) while the live music is going on is not conducive to its appreciation vs. at home, especially if I want to make comparisons at home with other presentations of the same piece or related pieces.
 
originally posted by Claude Kolm:

does anyone remember Roger Shattuck?
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Yes. He was still teaching at BU when I was there. He seemed a gentle soul to me.

I wonder what wines could be considered "Forbidden Knowledge"?
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
originally posted by Claude Kolm:

does anyone remember Roger Shattuck?
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Yes. He was still teaching at BU when I was there. He seemed a gentle soul to me.
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Interesting. I'd always thought UVA was end of the line for him. You learn something every day.
 
Reading online is a pain. I don't know about e-readers. I've never distinguished myself between reading in a torn paperback or a nice hardcover, except to the extent that most of my books are paper and I can only mark up my own books. As I've gotten older, of course, size of print matters, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.

The provenance idea, though, comes down to this. You have always loved painting x attributed to famous honcho painter y. It turns out the attribution is a longstanding historical mistake. It was by nobody z of the same period whose painting somehow got mixed up in y's studio. Is that painting suddenly not as good? Is it even really different? You've learned something about the capabilities of z, and had some false impressions about what kinds of paintings x did removed. But did the painting magically change? Provenance is historically important. It matters to auctioneers and collectors for economic reasons (you don't have to care at all about novels, though to collect first editions, and the principle isn't different here). It matters for significant historical reasons to art historians. And in a restricted way (knowing a painting is from the Renaissance as opposed to being a 20th century project in reproducing Renaissance painting does have interpretive significance)it matters to comprehension. But in some obvious way, it shouldn't matter to aesthetic appreciation unless you're looking for art in all the wrong places.

I'll stipulate all the vagaries of individual experience--bad placement in concert halls, going to a museum when you wanted to be outside in a sidewalk bar tabac having a glass of rose, that first taste of madeleine as opposed to all the other tastes--and still defend my final agreement with Jeff. Art costs some money at least, even if not as much as prestigious old bottles of bordeaux.
 
Format and materiality make a huge difference. Reading through manuscript sources and books, and then transcribing notes on a computer has a way of making all those different kinds of sources seem the same. I don't have experience reading the same work multiple times in multiple formats, that I recall.
 
Loesberg: "Is that painting suddenly not as good? Is it even really different? You've learned something about the capabilities of z, and had some false impressions about what kinds of paintings x did removed. But did the painting magically change?"

I was dragged to this view kicking and screaming, but my current answer to this question is 'yes'. Paintings and other works of art can be made more or less good by facts which are external to the complex of atoms which physically instantiates them. One example which has been somewhat influential is provided in T. S. Eliot's famous essay; I accept the idea that how great a poem is may depend in part on how the poetry of the future reacts to it.

Our interactions with artworks arise from a real object but the dance of mind and sensation that engages with an artwork is dynamic and interpretive. And I don't think it's plausible in the end to accept a sort of Wimsatt & Beardsley/Hanslick/Clive Bell style immanentism about which elements of the work and of life external to the work are properly part of that dance. The intersubjective boundaries on shareable experiences of artworks lie elsewhere, I think.

I feel bad for my role in having helped to stimulate these conversations here.
 
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
Loesberg: "Is that painting suddenly not as good? Is it even really different? You've learned something about the capabilities of z, and had some false impressions about what kinds of paintings x did removed. But did the painting magically change?"

I was dragged to this view kicking and screaming, but my current answer to this question is 'yes'. Paintings and other works of art can be made more or less good by facts which are external to the complex of atoms which physically instantiates them. One example which has been somewhat influential is provided in T. S. Eliot's famous essay; I accept the idea that how great a poem is may depend in part on how the poetry of the future reacts to it.

Our interactions with artworks arise from a real object but the dance of mind and sensation that engages with an artwork is dynamic and interpretive. And I don't think it's plausible in the end to accept a sort of Wimsatt & Beardsley/Hanslick/Clive Bell style immanentism about which elements of the work and of life external to the work are properly part of that dance. The intersubjective boundaries on shareable experiences of artworks lie elsewhere, I think.

I feel bad for my role in having helped to stimulate these conversations here.
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The Eliot essay isn't quite to the point. He rightly says that new works will change our perspective on older works. But our evaluation changes in those circumstances because the newer works have changed our criteria of evaluation. This is not a provenance issue. Bloom's Anxiety of Influence might get you closer since one of his ratios of revision entails the younger poet so absorbing the voice of the older one as to make the older seem the one influenced. Still, if one did reductive analysis of that claim, you could get it back out to a version of Eliot's contextualism.

But my claim was much narrower and not about the way history may change how we evaluate. I was saying no more and no less than that learning that painting a was painted by painter b rather than painter c (in which the difference between b and c does not entail large scale revisions of our historical understanding such as if we learned that Don Quixote actually were written by Pierre Menard) does not give us new information about the painting as an artwork.

Although I think as a mode of interpretation, a formalism such as Wimsatt & Beardsley (whose actual position was also much narrower, though Beardsley by himself went the whole hog)can be falsified fairly easily, in practice, for the solving of interpretive dispute, information from author's biographies has not been more effective than close reading. A Loesbergian principle that I can't prove accept by noting cases one after another is that no information about history or author will ever convince one to read a text in a way that runs counter to what one thinks the text says on the basis of linguistic convention and that cases of interpretive dispute are not really cases in which critics are in doubt about what texts mean but cases in which critics disagree about what texts mean and the critic who has one position will not be converted by another critic who says biographical information supports him. Of course, I've never been much interested in authors' lives and read them only as a matter of scholarly due diligence.

I also think we (I here as well) are confusing interpretation with evaluation. It is the latter that is properly in question. That the former might change with changes in knowledge of provenance (more as the knowledge is larger) shouldn't surprise us.
 
"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of sthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."

I think this at least suggests something stronger than the reading you seem to want to give it. That said, Eliot interpretation is not of special concern to me. I think there's something to the stronger reading.

A novel like Tristam Shandy, for instance, arguably gained in stature and importance partly because of the later works of Joyce, Faulkner, Broch, etc. If literature had gone a different way maybe we don't even remember it now.

Now, discovering that Sterne had not written TS would probably do nothing to change this evaluation, so this is not a problematic example for your apparent view.

However, there are a lot of things in the Musee Picasso that are mostly interesting because of the hand they came from. And I mean aesthetically interesting: Picasso did lots of weak-ish sketches that are interesting because you can see Picasso's hand in the line and because you have a sense for the works they led to. If some of these works turned out to be forgeries they would cease to have aesthetic interest altogether because the lines would not be correctly interpretable in the same contexts; the sketches I am thinking of are not self-sufficient.

I think there are some cases where discoveries of art and literary historians about a work's provenance have a similar effect. Showing that something is or is not from the hand of this or that master, or does or does not belong to this or that historical period, can make a difference for both our interpretation and our evaluation of that work.

I also tend to think that these considerations are in general far less important than those we would designate, in a conventional way, as stemming 'from the work itself'. But 'in general' doesn't mean 'always', and even where they are peripherally relevant this is not always the same as not relevant at all.

It might be though that they are less relevant in general to the novel, film, theater than to poetry, painting, sculpture.
 
Tristram Shandy was widely read in England in the 19th century, though probably more for sentimental comedy than self-conscious form. It took some work in the late 20th century to disentangle it from the rereading given it in the light of stream of consciousness and determine what it was doing. That work having been done I think indicates the perils of pushing Eliot too far.

Obviously a work that had a certain historic interest as a result of a specific historic tie (a minor work by Picasso) would lose that value if the tie turned out not to be the case. And I thought I had said, but I'll say again, I am not denying the effect of context on various elements in our understanding of a work. Some of this may shade the main issue, but none of it really changes it: all else equal, change of provenance does not equal change of aesthetic value.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:

I have learned a lot from the priciest bottles. And yes, some of the learnin' was: wow, that isn't worth it.

But other of the learnin' was: this is what heights such-and-such an appellation or grape can attain.
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Ah, little pearls on this dismal day.
 
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