facebook and art galleries

"Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room's inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums."

-John Berger from Ways of Seeing (The book, not the BBC specials)

Let's replace the board in this quote from John Berger with facebook. Though people certainly do use boards to pin up things in this way, the idea could be extended to some extent to interior decorating in general. Anyway, I agree with Berger about personalized spaces taking on the role of museums. While seeing the original is still the ideal, I can't make it out to the Louvre every time I want to take a look at the Mona Lisa.

In the particular case of the Mona Lisa, I have actually had more fulfilling experiences looking at reproductions than at the actual thing. It's relatively small, and on an average day at the Louvre, it is surrounded by people including a Louvre employee whose job it is to prevent any pictures from being taken. "No photo! No camera!" This is not an environment that is conducive to any sort of meditative contemplation. I'd rather look at a good reproduction in a book alone in silence. So the ideal here, seeing the original in a distraction-free environment, isn't even possible in a museum.

That is really tangential to my actual point though. Museums are where art goes to die. There are instances of new media installations which are an exception, but for the two dimensional art world, I believe this is the case. Let us compare what happens to a good photograph on facebook and what happens to a good photograph in a museum. On facebook, after a photo album is posted, a whole microcosm of social activity begins to occur around the images. People comment and discuss the content of the photographs. People use some of the images as their profile pictures. I find this very significant. The profile picture is an alias, it represents the person. It is a substitute for their physical presence. This is a relatively new and profound use for photographs. You get to choose a photograph that will act as a surrogate you.

Contrast this to a print in a museum which will be quietly passed over by people who most likely already have some idea of how they feel about it. There's much less activity in the museum. The function of the art doesn't evolve. It is just a reference point. It sits there as if to say, "yes, there is an original that does exist and it is here." Elsewhere, in books, on desktop backgrounds, on bedroom walls, the image is functioning out in the world, making impressions, contributing to personalized contexts, generating conversation... but in the museum it sits, remaining the same.

I think the future of art, or at least the relevant future of art is on the internet, in living rooms, in bedrooms and in books.

Don't feel like proofreading this right now. Fuck it.