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This paper deals with art museums that now post their entire or some significant part of their collections on the Internet. It tries to illuminate the effects of this movement. To accomplish this task, I ask two pre-questions: 1) What other things have already happened? Art resides in a museum, removed from its original settings of cathedral, public gardens, and royal palaces. Art displayed outside is brought inside and displayed with intricate stained-glass is juxtaposed with Picasso. The vision of the artist becomes subject to the vision of the curator. Later, this vision becomes subject to the vision of the photographer, who has also spread mass reproduction. 2) What are the functions of an art museum? For instance, traditionally, art museums display art. Whether the display is on the Internet or in the museum, this function is fulfilled. Of course, the museum has other social responsibilities such as maintaining the original intentions of the artist (which the above example does not do) and preserving the art, and educating the public about the art. How are these balanced and which are the most important? Now look at our initial question: What effects does posting collections of the Louvre (and other famous museums) have? Well, the museum and the art books already bring art together. The museum & art books already change the setting of art, too. Photography already creates problems of reproduction (and the museums already encourage it through their shops and other marketing schemes). Art books already makes art more accessible to those living far from a museum. Duchamp’s mustache-laced Mona Lisa in 1919 shows that parodies were already possible. So, does it do anything? Well, it amplifies all of these characteristics. You don’t need to visit multiple museums or buy two hundred books – you can get everything at once. There is no longer just one person changing the setting of a room in a museum or one person changing the layout of an art book –millions of users can change their view of the art through their web browser settings or by simply downloading the pictures and creating their own layouts. Downloading, uploading, and printing reproductions are more widespread. Similarly, parodies just require that you open your recently downloaded picture and edit it with photoshop. Although these effects are not innate only to the Internet, amplification of these effects can be significant. It supports the functions of education & display, allowing access to expand to a larger audience (the sites are even multi-lingual) & providing links to other websites with good information. It also provides links to other galleries, which allows the museum to acquire pieces symbolically. How about other functions? Well, it is not maintaining the original visions of the artist – there are now multiple layers of decontextualization. And, posting on the internet is unnecessary to preserve art in a digital format. However, the Internet can do a better job than art books in maintaining the artist’s visions, because some websites offer virtual tours of the museum (not just pictures of the artworks), which attempt to recreate the feeling of the museum. At least the web-surfer can see that the size of the art in comparison to sizes of other pieces and to visitors of the museum. Why are we discussing this? Well, it is changing the social perception of art! The main issue is that although the Internet didn’t create mass reproduction, it is carrying it to a whole new level. So it’s good for the museums to use the Internet to educate, but not to display. Of course, I don’t expect museums to acknowledge that mass reproduction is killing their own market through devaluation of the original, since they already promote it in all their shops! |