3.24.25 — The Aura of Art and the Web
For years now, critics have been out to dismantle fine-art institutions. The right takes a practical approach: cut their funding. The left, like me, would settle for deconstructing them.
Yet the religious aura of the arts is alive and well. I want to explore why, what that means, and what about art it misses. Every so often I like to use this blog to return to something I wrote as this Web site was taking shape, along with my ideas. Let me, then, excerpt from a longer article from 1994 and ask you to read more.
No reproduction, of course, can duplicate a painted surface, colors, scale, and site. These and other factors create that relationship to art works that viewers have held special. They initiate relations among producer, purchaser, and critic unimaginable before. In the haste of a new CD-ROM to create a virtual museum, one can easily forget how much was never meant for display on public walls. On slides or online, the art world, too, is one fiction among many. What it contains, though, and what it implies may turn out to be real.
If that fiction is seen as religious, think of all that it leaves out. Imagine grounding art in another metaphor, one as seemingly spiritual but harder to identify with a single creator. Critics have sometimes seen site-specific works as stand-ins for the artist. Think instead of a site larger and more diffuse than anyone alive. Think of those wonderful sixteenth-century paintings, by Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de Witte, of the spacious interior of a Dutch city church. For Saenredam especially, I imagine it as the distant comfort promised in Vermeer’s quiet View of Delft.
Art is in the people who stop to meet. In the Dutch society of these paintings, the large, well-lit spaces were like a village square. It is in the light that fashions inanimate spaces, majestic stonework, and un-self-conscious pet dogs alongside the high and mighty.
Art is in the saints or gargoyles on the pillars, even when they appear to come alive. The carvings turn their back on religious dogma to let in a sense of play and natural diversity. It is in a child’s graffiti on the stone, thumbing its nose at the whole sermon going on elsewhere. It is in the grave markers, attesting to a human tragedy that no religious sensibility can ever fully explain away.
Art, too, is in the detachment and provocation of the painter. Thanks to willing viewers like myself, a painter or performer can pretend to see and absorb all this. Along with the artist, I have agreed to imagine that art is only about sharing it among men and women.
Well before Internet art made the Whitney Biennial, artists have been agent provocateurs, flawed collaborators, and double agents as often as spiritual guides. Either way, they know that there is no short cut, soulful or otherwise, to going about their work. This difficult age looks to an imagined past for shortcuts; think of the American elections. I look at art just because it is no less a pretense or an institution. In its precision of sentiment, it knows better.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.