by Jon Lackman | 19 October 2010 | Museums
Over at L’atelier des icônes, Louise Merzeau writes:
In the form of a “digital odyssey to the heart of painting,” the exhibition “Révélations” at the Petit Palais confronts us with the most poverty-stricken discourse on art and the art of looking. Produced and financed entirely by the screen manufacturer Samsung (for the Journées du Patrimoine), this branding exercise doesn’t merely cede to the patron the job of the curator … In welcoming this “installation,” the venerable Petit Palais legitimizes what this show pretends to try to correct — the laziness of rushed looking …
Its approach is simple: side by side, or one atop the other, are hung a photograph of a canonical painting and a 55-inch LED screen playing a digital video produced by Samsung. This might seem to be a neutral arrangement, but it’s dishonest from the start. Beside the pristine glass and saturated colors of the screens sit execrable reproductions, with bad frames, faded colors, and odd croppings (Mary Magdalene practically cut out of Mantegna’s ‘Dead Christ’) …
For the most part, the videos simply pan across the surface of the painting in question … But in several, the Samsung engineers got audacious. Thus for Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement chez les rois maures’ … they made the blood flow (like the kitschy religious trinkets sold around the Vatican). A bit farther along, Georges de La Tour’s candles don’t sit still, they flicker for real… In the de Chirico, a playful jiggling of the forms helpfully dissipates the painter’s anxiously frozen time.
Not content to save these masterworks from their flatness and immobility, the technology also relieves them of their silence. For the sake of “auditory contextualization” (as the brochure calls it) we hear the sound of the waves in ‘The Raft of the Medusa,” the sound of the storm in Giorgione, and so on …
I can already hear the demagogues tweaking my elitism and trumpeting the pedagogical merits of such childishness … [But they're] just surfing the fad for anecdotal storytelling while distrusting the public … The worst damage caused by the Samsung exhibition isn’t to the 40 masterpieces, which have been through plenty and whose sacredness surely feeds on such idiocy. No, the worst damage is to digital technology, here reduced to marketing gadgetry. How better to undermine these new tools’ potential for intelligent uses than by infantilizing the spectator and concealing the complexities the pixel has to offer?
Because the curatorial institution is taking the risk of presenting only reproductions (surely the only really daring thing about this project) the press kit doesn’t hesitate to invoke Malraux. Unfortunately, sticking copies to a wall doesn’t suffice to create an ‘imaginary museum.’ There has to also be a supporting idea, of the distance from one image to the next, and of the time that enshrines them in our memory.
