I May Not Know Art, But I Know What I've Liked

...on Facebook, re-tweeted, put on Instagram, et cetera.

An anecdote, to begin: A friend and I were in the Impressionist wing of the Met the other day (don't worry, this isn't the start of an exercise for my writing workshop).  I must admit that generally I find art museums rather depressing.  Something about seeing those encircling lines of portraits and landscapes on the walls like a well-preserved collection of pinned butterflies puts me in a funereal state of mind.  Nevertheless, the liveliness of Monet, Manet, Gauguin, and Pissarro made up for their institutional surroundings and proved a fine way to spend an afternoon.

Some Pissarro for you

Of course, my companion and I were hardly alone in our idyll.  My years as a dazzling urbanite have made it second nature to ignore the crowd, yet on this occasion I was struck by an odd activity: Out of a crowd of say around 30 people in the room with us, I would estimate at least a half to three-quarters spent their time rushing up to each painting, taking out their phones, snapping a picture of the picture, and then hurrying onto the next canvas to repeat the process.


I suppose if I were a reasonable, normal person, I would simply dismiss this with a "Kids these days" and go on about my business.  But as you well know, Dear Reader, I am anything but balanced, and this display of technophilia set me to thinking about the experience of art through a digital lense.  

Let us begin by considering the activity at hand.  Although these avid photographers would almost certainly deny it, there seem to be a fundamental assertion about art displayed in their activity, namely that the full experience of art is immediate and requires no active engagement or contemplation beyond the most surface level.  This seems evident if only from the minimal amount of time spent engaging with any particular objet d'art.  After all, no one was forcing the quick pace that the gallery adopted, so it stands to reason that the picture-takers were well pleased with the amount of time they allotted.    

I think the source of this idea is something like the following line of reasoning:  1) The general populace has a semi-Romantic idea that "good" art produce an instantaneous emotional reaction 2) Art hanging in a museum must be good, or else it would not be in the museum 3) Therefore, to engage with a work in a museum is simply to stare at it for a few seconds, assume one has absorbed its aesthetic value, and move on.  

Random picture of a kitten to break-up theorizing tedium

Of course, in one sense this behavior is nothing new.  I'm sure throughout time people have given less than a full allotment of their time and attention to Schoenberg recitals and Picasso exhibitions.  What is new in the behavior I saw, I think, is the way that technology allows a new relationship with the artistic object, an obsessive, documentary way of being that catalogues these fragmentary encounters and then repurposes them through the internet in general and social media. 

Certainly, a degree of narcissism in museum-goers and art patrons is nothing new, as this blog itself stands witness.  There is, after all, a very fine line between taste and snobbery.
On the other hand, the act of seeing most works of art through a phone's camera lens does seem to announce a new phase of relation to art.  Previously, the social aspect of art viewing was mainly found in the group identity of being a member of an audience or as part of a crowd at a museum, essentially anonymous during the act of viewing itself.  The focus, even in a limited way, on the artistic work.  

Yet now, through the intervention of social media and such, the work becomes secondary to the fact that "I" as a subject am the one who is viewing it.  A cellphone photo is not normally kept on a harddrive, but is uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, or even just shared through a text or email.  But in this act of sharing, the art object is no longer the focus, but rather the personal curation that the individual photographer provides.  Rather than any message in the work itself, the artistic object instead signifies that I as a consumer like this particular set of products and can appropriate some of their cachet for my own self-image.  Thus, art as a cultural force is forced more and more into the role of scorekeeper and commodity of identity.

And if their pic of Van Gogh raises their Klout score, then who are we mere mortals to judge