There is no conspiracy.
Okay, after a fair amount of interest in my "Improving Aphrodite" post from the other day, I made it public, and I'm happy to see so many people as piqued by the injustice to art and anatomy as I was
( Read more... )
But those skinnier statues *are* reality. It's all around us, the constant, overwhelming pressure for women to modify their bodies to a physical standard that the majority of us could never maintain and live with (literally).
I know, rationally, that every image in print is Photoshopped and that the female bodies I see in the media are exceptions, but that doesn't stop the simultaneous stab of self-hatred those images are designed to provoke in me so I will continue to be a good consumer. There's a reason they work after all. They're effective at stimulating body hatred so I'll buy into whatever cure they're selling ( ... )
Reply
But a little perspective reminds us that we do still have the originals, we still have the whole genre of "classic art" as well as the good quality reproductions. And that in this particular case, the statuettes aren't selling anything other than themselves...they're not advertising a cellulite cream, or anything. They're a late-model symptom of the bigger problem, they are not the problem themselves.
And I guess the bottom line is that I can look at images critically and reject them, and it has nothing to do with "floating" through life or some elixir I took from a bottle...it's from years and years of practice at looking at things like these and really seeing them, and calling them out for what they are. Which is why I posted that, and ( ... )
Reply
Walter Benjamin, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," introduced the idea that the art copy affected our perceptions of the value of the original. He wrote, "For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual" and that the reproducibility of the art can destroy its aura.
Anyone who's ever seen a "classic" piece of art that's much reproduced (like, say, Van Gogh's "Starry Night") in a museum has had the experience of feeling that the original is smaller, less impressive, different, and maybe even wrong in some way. We may expect it to be smooth when it's textured and layered with paint. We may ( ... )
Reply
Reply
I think art education is useful, but most don't get much of it in schools, and so artworks (especially via reproductions) have become just another commodity, often indistinguishable from advertisements (and in fact many pieces of art have been used in advertisements in one form or another). It doesn't help that the Metropolitan Museum charges $20 for adults and is beyond the reach of many people who might be interested (and yes, the fee is "suggested," but if you don't pay that or want to pay less, you have to deal with major scorn from the ticket sellers ( ... )
Reply
I know what you're talking about with the "disappointment" when looking at art, I'd put the Mona Lisa up there as the obvious example of a widely "disappointing" painting. But I wonder (and wonder what you think) if that's really due to comparisons to reproductions, or just because the reputation is so large, the original can't live up to it? Like whenever you see movie stars, they inevitably seem so short--their presence on the big screen automatically, in my mind, makes them large, so large that a real person (who then turns famous) can never live up to it. What if it's the same with art--not that we've seen so many beautiful mugs and calendars with Mona Lisa on them, that the painting can't compare, but just that people wonder, looking at the actual oil, why there are so many mugs and calendars? That people disappointed by the Met (Oh! my heart!) are comparing to some ethereal "something" that they didn't notice in the reproductions, and that they didn't notice in ( ... )
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment