ELIZABETH M.

CARNEY

MA DISSERTATION

CURATING THE ART MUSEUM

MARTIN CAIGER-SMITH

SEEING IMAGES:

CONTEMPORARY USES OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN CONSTRUCTING OUR

EXPERIENCES OF ART AND MUSEUMS

10,429 WORDS

13 SEPTEMBER 2012
 Abstract

Photographic reproductions have made images of art, rather than actual works of art, the

primary means of art consumption. This paper considers photography as a tool for

official and personal memory through the specific genre of the art reproduction,

drawing from established theories of photography including seminal works by Susan

Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and John Berger, as well as recent and

contemporary sources that consider current technologies and the effects of social media

and digital photography. The concept of tourism provides an important focus for this

discussion because the tourist is so deeply associated with the camera, which can

provide a method of structuring experiences in foreign environments and also produces

images that memorialize, and come to define, experience. The tourist is also connected

to the commercialism of art museums, which increasingly operate as tourist sights with

cafés, shops, and complex digital platforms. These are popular strategies for increasing

visitor numbers and revenue, and such programs are rationalized as strategies for

appealing to new audiences and for welcoming the “uninitiated” lay public to the elite

space of the art museum. These strategies, however, appease rather than appeal, and

may ultimately limit possibilities for deep engagement across the varied museum

public. Museums may be necessitated to play the game of commercialism for fiscal

viability, but this should not delimit the visitor experience, which should include the

direct experience of material works of art.

 Acknowledgment

I wish to acknowledge the help and support of my instructors, colleagues, friends, and
family.

Special thanks to:

Dan Carney, Sr.

Margaret Carney
Sarah Carney
Dan Carney, Jr.
Martin Caiger-Smith
Olivia Tait
Andy Trombley
The residents of the 4th floor
Twelve art thieves

I also wish to thank the Fidelity Foundation for generously supporting my year of study
at The Courtauld Institute of Art.
 Contents

Introduction 1

The Almighty Photograph: Seeing is Believing 5

The Pencil of Nature: Obliging Servant of Art History 7

Imperfect Substitutions: What is Lost 10

Snapshots: To Structure and Construct Experience 14

Cause and Effect: The Evolution of Technology 20

Commodification: We are all Complicit 25

The Virtual Museum: Questioning Realities 31

Notes 35

Bibliography 39

List of Illustrations 43

Illustrations 45
 It is not reality that photographs make immediately accessible, but images.

—Susan Sontag1

A new performance and installation art project opened in August 2012 at Tate

Modern, The Tanks, offers visitors the opportunity to feed back about their experiences.

A public board is plastered in stickers with responses to various questions including:

“what is the role of the audience?” In perusing the responses, I discovered one answer

submitted by a child participant: “to be quite [sic] and take photos.” At the time, I had

already been thinking about the act of taking photographs in the museum as it relates to

the practices of tourist photography, the developing technology of social media, and the

relationship between art objects, images of art objects, and viewers. This child's

response is particularly interesting because, while likely too young to have learned to

look at art with a critical or intellectual eye, he or she is not unaccustomed to taking

photographs. The ubiquity of the camera in any situation involving visual attention is

something quite natural to the modern child, who models his or her behavior on that of

his or her parents and others they may observe in situations of spectator experience.2

The art museum offers one such type of experience where the camera seems to be an

appropriate tool for recording events and structuring behavior.

For the habitual museum visitor, the concept of the “museum tourist” may recall

familiar mental images of the in-gallery photographer: the background noise of a

synthesized shutter click on someone's mobile phone; the ever-present circle of cameras

around Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night at MoMA; and, of course, the infamous mob of

Mona Lisa paparazzi at the Louvre. The normalcy of photographing works of art during

a museum visit parallels people taking pictures of anything they consume throughout
 2
the day, especially in foreign places: food, sights, monuments, objects, and artworks. It

seems to be a harmless activity, essentially benign except for the occasional annoyance

caused by an interrupted reverie.

There are larger implications attached to this familiar trend of in-gallery

snapshot photography, however, particularly as museums rethink their visitor

photography policies, develop their own uses of digital photography and social media

for institutional gain, and consider the use of technology more generally as part of

displays, interpretive materials, educational strategies, and marketing schemes. Central

to my concern is how the act of photographing in the gallery perpetuates the experience

of artworks as images, rather than as objects. This approach pervades both scholarly and

popular experiences of art. Photographic reproductions of artworks are both the

essential tool for art historians and the focus of popular art publications including

catalogues and coffee table books. The very semiotics of describing photographs of

artworks as “photographic reproductions” is misleading. Art reproductions, whether

photographic or otherwise, can only represent or refer to, but never fully reproduce the

work of art which, with only very rare exceptions,3 carries a multitude of specific

qualities that make it unique.

As a material medium, photography has changed drastically—and yet we

continue to use the term “photograph” to describe images that are materially disparate.

As the shifts in media from tempera to oil to acrylic have not altered the inherent

concept of painting as a mode of representation, so too has photography maintained its

inherent quality from Daguerreotype to film to jpeg. The concept of photography has

continued throughout these shifts in materiality because of the consistency of the

photographic image. As images (not objects), photographs all share that illusory quality

that seems to closely mimic the way we see. The material photograph itself—paper and
 3
emulsion, paper and ink, or light on a screen—is the silent vessel of the content of its

image. As Roland Barthes observes in his canonical Camera Lucida: Reflections on

Photography, “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is

always invisible: it is not it that we see...the referent adheres.”4 The photograph's

referent, not the photograph itself, is what we see when we look at it—as Barthes notes,

“in order to 'see' the photographic signifier, [the viewer is] obliged to focus at very close

range,”5 meaning that it is only with acute awareness of a photograph's materiality that

we pay the object itself any attention. From this perspective, the great theorists

including Sontag, Benjamin, and Barthes as well as studies of pre-digital photography

continue to be relevant in a digital age; though it is essential to build upon the deeply

rooted history of the photographic medium and to acknowledge the new ways that

people see and experience the world photographically.

With the development of photographic communication technologies, the acts of

taking and sharing images have become essential elements in constructing and

solidifying experience as a lived reality. This has consequences for the museum, in

which photography can act as a tool for the museum tourist to structure his or her

experience. Beyond collecting digital images of artworks, these photographers can also

utilize them as exchangeable social media through information-sharing internet

applications. This contributes to the continued holistic commodification of museum

experience.

Art institutions face enormous pressures that are changing the museum

experience. The public art museum exists within societies' extant economic, ideological,

political, social, and cultural systems and must therefore operate within certain

prescribed boundaries. While the museum ideally (or ideologically) exists for and

operates within non-financial value systems—perhaps describable by such terms as

 4
beauty, aesthetic experience, innovation, culture, or the problematic concept of

“meaning”—the economic strain of capitalism on public art institutions is of great

concern for their longevity. When combating a turbulent economy with commercial

economizing, public cultural institutions increasingly resemble their corporate

counterparts. This resemblance greatly disturbs those who fear that the integrity of the

public art museum, the quality of the experience it enables, and the treatment of the art

that it stewards are at risk because of the distractions of commerce. These apparently

opposing stances are part of larger ongoing struggles to define the role of the public art

museum: is it a social space, a cathedral to art, an educational institution, an

entertainment venue, a moralizing force, a shopping center, or an academic resource?

And, further, how does the museum actively shape its own role as part of economic,

cultural, and social systems?

To be a site for looking at works of art is not the art museum's exclusive

prerogative. Photographic reproductions have made images of art the primary means of

art consumption, and the museum increasingly operates as a tourist sight and center of

commercial activity. Promotion of the museum's non-art functions restricts the value of

its collections by shifting institutional focus, and subsequently visitors' focus, away

from an ideally unmediated and direct art experience. Both digitization and

commercialization may be strategies for appealing to new audiences and welcoming the

“uninitiated” to the elite space of the museum. Such strategies, however, appease rather

than appeal, and may ultimately limit possibilities for deep engagement across the

varied museum public.

 5
The Almighty Photograph: Seeing is Believing

In this digital age, the advancement of technology and human dependency upon

it should lead us to question definitions of reality. Are virtual realities valid modes of

experience? Does technology actually distance us from reality as it attempts to give us

access to the realities of the world? We should ask these questions, but rarely do.

Instead, we are conditioned to know, through records of the experiences of others, a

world that is infinitely more vast than the scope of our individual lived realities. The

photographic image has become central to our processes of gathering and sharing

knowledge, and there is little question as to whether photographs represent reality.

Photographs seem to imitate the way we see, and so we invest in them a certain level of

trust so that we may utilize them to give us access to a world that we can only know

indirectly. Photography as a tool for personal, collective, and official memories depends

upon its perceived ability to capture reality—specifically, to prove that something

existed or happened in front of the camera.6 We may wonder about the validity of

experiences that are constructed or mediated through technological means; and yet, we

continue to trust them so that we may make us of them.

Photography’s claim to realism has made it key to the construction of history.

The pre-photographic arts were also closely tied to history as tools to record, interpret,

and disseminate narratives of the past (as in history painting), the present (portraiture),

and ideologies (mythological and religious images), but painting can offer only

illusionism. Realism has been reiterated in photographic discourse since Henry Fox

Talbot promoted the camera as The Pencil of Nature.7 While most illusory paintings

lure but never seduce us to believe that the image accurately reflects the reality of its

referent, the photograph consummates that seduction. A photograph is never less than
 6
“a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be,”8 as Sontag

effectively illustrates:

between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived

long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the

camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most

Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it

would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if

the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would

probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph

of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.9

Because the photograph is able to communicate to us in such a convincingly

direct way, an ability rooted in what Barthes calls the photograph's “tautological”

property (“a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. It is as if the Photograph

always carries its referent with itself”10), it has become a tool for multifarious ends. At

its outset, photography became a popular means for seeing beyond lived reality for the

purposes of learning and entertainment. Savvy early entrepreneurial photographers sold

masses of prints of foreign and “exotic” sights. Photographs of the Sphinx and Pyramids

in Egypt, for example, which might be considered among the first photographic art

reproductions, were available from photographic studios in Britain and the United

States as early as 1856. Though engravings depicting Egyptian monuments had been in

circulation long before this time, photographs offered something that prints could not:

the illusion of having-been-there. Such images only increased in popularity, as albumen

prints of foreign scenes became major money-makers for mass photographic publishers

such as Francis Frith and George Washington Wilson. Pictures of monuments as well as

reproductions of famous works of art hit the popular market as cartes-de-visite, the
 7
progenitor of the modern picture postcard, in full force in 1859.11 As historian of

photography Naomi Rosenblum shows, “this mass consumption of images had a

profound if not always determinable effect on the viewing public, in that photographic

evidence was considered synonymous with truth and the image as a substitute for

firsthand experience.”12

The Pencil of Nature: Obliging Servant of Art History

The invention of the half-tone printing process in 1881 allowed the mass

printing of photographs in line with text and marks the roots of contemporary strategies

for entertainment, information design, and, especially, advertising. Adherence to reality

and ease of reproduction are two qualities of photography that make it so attractive to

history and to visual culture in general. They are also what has caused photographers to

struggle for recognition as artists. It is telling that the Metropolitan Museum of Art

didn't start collecting photographs until 1928, when art photography advocate Alfred

Stieglitz donated several of his own photographs to the museum; demarcations between

painting and photography still linger, persistently, in valuation systems of artworks.

Photography, with its original associations to objective visual representation, is an

imaging system suited to history but simultaneously imperfect as an art medium. The

stigma against photography was not helped by the fact that its formal approach derived

that of painting rather than claiming its own formal idiom from the outset. As Barthes

said, “Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting.”13

Photography's most immediate and profound impact on art history was not its

application as a medium; rather, it was its enabling of the dissemination of the art image

through photographic art reproduction.

 8
The art historian's most valuable tool is the photographic reproduction—or,

more accurately, the slew of photographic reproductions of artworks that sit at the art

historian's fingertips. The flexibility afforded by the photograph's accessibility,

affordability, and, not least, its manipulability have made it critical to the discipline's

existence. In a compelling bit of historiography that would make for valuable reading in

introductory art history courses, Frederick Bohrer illustrates that:

the elision (or, better, reduction) of the art object to its photographic

image is the very key to both the productiveness and limitation of

modern art history. This very deferral of the actuality of art for a world of

ideal visibility has been the discipline's key move.14

Bohrer also makes explicit how the photograph has become an unrecognized integrated

convention of art historical practice, so that the vast majority of art historians think of

the problems of photographic reproductions only rarely and tangentially.

'Most members of these professions have avoided explicitly considering

the consequences of photography as it affects their own work, as well as

on a larger scale.' This strange fact might be taken to indicate just how

socialized into their discipline art historians must be to largely ignore the

precise thing constantly before their eyes.15

Two key developments in terms of accessing artworks have coincided with the

rise and expansion of the discipline of art history: respectively, the modern museum and

photographic reproduction of art. The genesis of the art museum began to pull artworks

out of private, closed collections for public access, a development epitomized by the

opening of the Louvre to the French public following the fall of Louis XVI. American

and European photographers dedicated to the reproduction of artworks were active by

the early 1850s, and as they gained access to royal, antiquarian, and other private
 9
collections, they enabled unprecedented dissemination of images of artworks.16 Scholars

still have access to an ever-expanding wealth of images to analyze. They also have the

capability to juxtapose, arrange, contrast, and compare whatever images they like, at

great speed and from anywhere in the world. The public museum of art and the

photographic reproduction thus share the capacity to break down certain barriers of art

access.

It is largely because of the creation of the art history book—epitomized by the

survey textbooks that initiate every academic into the field—that photographic

reproduction is so heavily entrenched in the discipline and ubiquitous in visual culture.

The art historical survey, so fundamental to contemporary education, functions as an

adaptive reiteration of André Malraux's famous musée imaginaire, which celebrated the

manipulability of the photographic reproduction and the power of the illustrated art

treatise. Malraux’s book, Museum Without Walls,17 originally published in French in

1965, is not a museum without limits as its English title implies, for it most certainly

has a front and back cover and finite page numbers.18 If it is a museum, it is one with an

entirely different set of limitations in comparison to the brick-and-mortar museum, for it

is a collection not of artworks, but of images bound together by Malraux’s narrative

text.

It is through the flexibility of photographic images and their arrangement in a

linear progression across the pages of a book that the chronically chronological

approach to art and art history is commonly understood. As Malraux acknowledges,

“the world of photographs is, unquestionably, only the servant of the world of originals;

and yet, appealing less directly to the emotions and far more to the intellect, it seems to

reveal or to 'develop'—in the sense in which this word is used in photography—the

creative act to make of the history of art primarily a continuing succession of

 10
creations.”19 In other words, the art historical text, substantiated by photographic

reproductions, is based in intellectual inquiry, not in the experiential value of aesthetic

objects. Furthermore, as Malraux reminds us, since the invention of photography, “the

history of art has been the history of that which can be photographed,”20 so that objects

that have not been able to be convincingly reproduced photographically have simply

been left out of art history's official narratives.

Imperfect Substitutions: What is Lost

Malraux was concerned with the limitations of black and white photography.21

He anticipated that the improvement of color photography would eliminate the

inadequacy of photographic reproduction and allow for a more inclusive art history by

giving justice to artworks that depend upon the subtleties of color. Indeed, as

technology improves and as digital color photography stabilizes as an easily accessible

technology, the surface of the modern photograph appears to imitate our natural way of

seeing to an increasingly higher degree. With this heightened quality, photographic art

reproductions have become so visually seductive that their inadequacy to reproduce

reality is suppressed even more than that of the black and white photograph. Whereas

we see, clearly, the inability of a black and white photograph to give us critical

information, we forget how misleading a full-color photograph can be. Black and white

photographs are, as were illustrative prints before them, “more up front about their

limitations.”22

The issue of color is one of several that Barbara Savedoff summarizes as

problems of “Looking at Art Through Photographs,” published nearly two decades ago

but still relevant here. Particularly useful is Savedoff's presentation of the specific,

practical limitations of photographic reproductions of paintings. These may seem to be

 11
obvious points, but we do not regularly acknowledge these failings of photography

because to do so undermines their usefulness to us. She describes in detail the following

issues: reproductions “do not capture the colors of the original,” and “can at most show

the colors of a painting in a fixed light and from a certain angle,” thereby illuminating

any visual effects of iridescence or minute variations in hue or shade. They do not

communicate the variations of surface texture or specifics of scale. The frame is

generally cropped from the photographic reproduction, along with the surrounding

“frame” of the hanging wall and other architectural surroundings. The orientation of the

viewer to the original is lost through reproduction, both in terms of the viewing angle

necessitated by the work's hanging position and the possibility of variable viewing

distances. Savedoff also vaguely describes how, in the reproduction, “the physical

presence of the painting is lost”—basically, how our awareness of the tangible existence

of the work of art as a material object becomes subsumed by our attention to its

reproducible properties.23 It is worth also mentioning a critical extension of these losses

that Savedoff does not discuss—that is, the dialogue that occurs between artworks

within physical space.

These separations of reproduction from original are amplified in the digital

photographic reproduction. The color-sensing capabilities of most digital cameras are

still inferior to those of film, and subtle manipulations of color are not only easier with

digital files, but a standard part of digital image processing that many cameras perform

automatically. The lost “physical presence” of artworks is exacerbated in the digital

photographic reproduction, which is made up of light on screen rather than pigment on

paper. Regardless of the problematic variations in monitors’ color balance and

brightness, the basic illuminated quality of the digital image separates it further from

material objects that reflect, rather than emanate, light. The screen also eliminates any
 12
control over the scale of images and encourages cropping by the user.24 Certain digital

images also allow ways of looking that are impossible in a normal museum context,

such as the extremely high resolution images available through an online initiative by

the Google Art Project which enables users to look at the surfaces of paintings in minute

detail (figs. 1a–1c). This particular effect of the improvement of digital technologies has

potential advantages, but also threatens to reduce an awareness of the basic limitations

of photographs because, like vibrant color, high picture quality can be seductive.

More broadly, Savedoff analyzes the centrality of the image and the suppression

of the materiality of art through critique of three major and enduring theorists of the

photographic reproduction of art: Malraux with his Museum Without Walls, Walter

Benjamin through his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction, one of the most enduring theories of the effects of mass media, and John

Berger in his book Ways of Seeing, a treatise on the centrality of images to valuation

systems of art. She argues that each of these theorists “focuses on the reproducible

images of artworks to the neglect of art's non-reproducible properties,” which, even

when given “token acknowledgment,” “are not considered essential to our knowledge

and understanding of art.”25 Instead, she argues, Malraux's celebration of the

opportunities afforded by photography and Benjamin and Berger's “politically

motivated rejection of the value of the original”26 depend upon the interchangeability of

images of art with their material referents. The critical point of her analysis is laid out

very clearly:

despite the claims of Benjamin and Berger, the unique value of the

original artwork has not been destroyed by photographic reproduction.

What has happened is that photography has changed, perhaps

irrevocably, the way we see paintings and sculptures, and it is this fact
 13
which makes it so difficult to discover and appreciate the unique value of

the original.27

Savedoff's interpretation of both Berger and Benjamin is, unfortunately, somewhat

forced. She does not discuss the cautionary tone of these two theorists who lamented the

loss of, rather than rejected the value of, the original. She does, however, point out

correctly that Benjamin and Berger both discuss the unique value of art as already lost,

and makes the meaningful distinction that in shifting our attention from object to image,

photography has changed not the inherent value of the original art object, but our ability

to understand that value.

Berger argues that the inherent value of the original has changed, and for the

worse. But he acknowledges that original artworks are not “useless.”28 For Berger, the

reproduction of art cannot replicate a quality exclusive to the original, in which “the

silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the

traces of the painter's immediate gestures.” He seems to imply that it is only by looking

at the original that we can relate to the work of art, because observing the traces of the

artist's hand “has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the

picture plane and one's own act of looking at it. In this special sense all paintings are

contemporary.”29

Our investment in the applicability of photographic reproduction gives them

power as substitutes for originals and necessitates that we ignore the possibility that

artistic meaning might be found in those aspects of the work of art that are not

reproducible. The signature geometric paintings of Piet Mondrian offer a telling

example. Mondrian has become an icon for modernism because of his works made in

black, white, and primary blue, yellow, and red paint; these mesh with a modern

aesthetic that is minimal, geometric, and abstract. What does not mesh with the
 14
particular modern aesthetic popularly associated with Mondrian are the visible

brushstrokes and aged materials that now distinguish the surface of Mondrian's

paintings from digital images that reduce them to unmodulated geometric patterns. A

selection of images of Composition with Double Line and Yellow (1932; figs. 2a–2c),

for example, illustrates the difficulty of determining the physical state of the actual

painting from photographs. Distilled five-color designs imitating Mondrian's

compositions appear all over commercial products in stark brightness; these are the

popularly understood images of them. Viewers may be caught by surprise when they

see that the actual paintings have quite a different character from the stark photographic

images that promote them.

Snapshots: To Structure and Construct Experience

It is important to distinguish snapshot photographs of artworks from “official”

photographic reproductions that are meant to be (or to seem to be) objective. Generally

shot from straight angles and cropped to perfectly rectangular images that exclude any

frames, official reproductions such as those printed in books and found on museum

websites purport to function as document (fig. 3). Museum visitor snapshots, though

technically deficient compared to official images of artworks, occasionally offer

information that is excluded from the standard reproduction. For example, a museum

visitor's photo indicates the effects of framing and lighting on René Magritte's The

Treachery of Images (1929; fig. 4). Snapshots also have the distinct advantage of being

able to translate information about the personal art experience. In the snapshot, there is

proof of having-been-there and having-seen-that, so that they document an experience

rather than simply an object. They may thus be much more likely to recall to the

photographer his or her specific experience of the artwork. Snapshots and reproductions
 15
from unofficial sources are nevertheless much more likely to distort certain aspects of

artworks, such as color and dimensions (fig. 5).

There is now an anonymity and performativity in the enterprise of digital

interaction that positions photography even closer to theater than to painting—a

resonance that was originally suggested by Barthes.30 Current applications of

photography, while still inextricably tied to imagings and imaginings of reality, are now

also about the presentation, selection, and the hyper-real simulation of our life

experiences in an instantaneous, public, and mass-distributable fashion. Since the

invention of consumer digital photography in the early 1980s, the development of the

medium itself has been superficial: picture resolution, color vibrancy, ease of storage,

increasingly compact cameras, faster “shutter” speeds, and so forth. By and large, the

most recent developments have been aimed specifically at appealing to consumer tastes

for taking “good” photographs, which generally means clear, colorful, and crisp images

(like advertisements). The real innovation in digital photographic imaging, however,

was its integration into wired devices, most notably the ubiquitous cameraphone, for

which picture quality is secondary to connectivity.31

In the 1970s Sontag foreshadowed the continuing hyper-realization and

spectacularization of the modern experience when she described “that mentality which

looks at the world as a set of potential photographs” which is made possible and

exacerbated by technology.32 Such a mentality creates a rift between actual lived reality

and that which is recorded by the camera: as when watching for a perfect photo

opportunity, waiting with our cameras raised for the snap, we forget to look away from

the preview screen to the actual events unfolding before us. This mentality and the

increased portability and affordability of digital cameras has normalized the behaviors

of avid tourist photography and snapshot portraiture. These are now activities that are
 16
not only normal, but expected attachments to “significant” lived moments. While such

normal behavior seems, on the whole, a simple record-making or memory-forming

practicality, it is the very entrenchment of its normalcy that gives the camera immense

power to shape both the way we see the world and the way we mentally register our

own lived experiences. Sontag elaborates that even “those occasions when the taking of

photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen

the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity—and ubiquity—of the

photographic record is photography's 'message,' its aggression,”33 reiterating

philosopher Martin Heidegger's cautionary approach to the blind integration of

technology: “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we

passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way

when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we

particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.”34

Indeed, the ubiquity of the camera causes shifts in ways of seeing and in ways of

experiencing. Brian O'Doherty, artist and art philosopher, considers the modern use of

photographs, in terms of our reasons for taking them and the way in which we use them,

as part of a larger propensity to alienate ourselves from reality in order to experience:

“It often feels as if we can no longer experience anything if we don't first alienate it. In

fact, alienation may now be a necessary preface to experience.”35 To illustrate his point,

O'Doherty uses the particular genre of the family holiday snapshot, through which you

can “see what a good time you had;”

experience can then be adjusted to certain norms of 'having a good time.'

These Kodachrome icons are used to convince friends you did have a

good time—if they believe it, you believe it. Everyone wants to have

photographs not only to prove but to invent their experience. This

 17
constellation of narcissism, insecurity, and pathos is so influential I

suppose none of us is quite free from it.36

O'Doherty is touching on a few major points here in this example that rings—perhaps

slightly stings—of truth. First, he asserts that reality must be mediated by some sort of

alienating apparatus in order for us to experience it. Second, that we use photographs

both to record and to construct our experiences. Third, that sharing, or at least preparing

to share, is an important part of confirming those experiences that we have created

through images. Fourth, that a narcissistic impulse drives this entire enterprise.

Crucially, O'Doherty is edging closer to an idea that I want to put forth here: that

photography is one observable example of how the way that we experience the world

and represent our experiences to ourselves and to others is increasingly distant from our

embodied reality.

It is certainly relevant that this is an example drawn from O'Doherty's musings

on visual and physiological experiences of modern art Inside the White Cube. He

discusses how art experiences are mediated not necessarily through camera technology

that is exterior to ourselves, but through the specific ways in which we have been

instructed to look at modern art. He describes the “Spectator” and the “Eye,” those

anonymous observers of art that have become common descriptors for aesthetic

contemplation in the rhetoric of art scholarship, as surrogates that we use to alienate

ourselves from direct interaction and to validate art experience. “Presence before a work

of art,” O'Doherty suggests, “means that we are absent ourselves in favor of the Eye and

Spectator, who report to us what we might have seen had we been there.”37 O'Doherty's

Eye and Spectator, like photography, are formal ways of seeing that are entrenched in

rhetoric and convention that alienate us from our experiences. Indeed, O'Doherty would
 18
seem to suggest that an unmediated experience of art is not possible—and that

alienation is key to our modernity.

Photography functions as a mediator of experience in varied, almost paradoxical

ways. Sontag shows how: “a way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a

way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting

experience into an image, a souvenir.”38 Sontag highlights the example of the

inexperienced traveler, who is unaccustomed to navigating foreign places and for whom

“the very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of

disorientation...Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and

whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a

picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on.”39

Sontag is referencing the tourist in general, but this applies to the specific situation of

the museum tourist who is unfamiliar with a museum visited for the first time—and

even more so for one who is unfamiliar with the art museum experience in a

comprehensive sense. For the museum visitor who finds him or herself in foreign

territory within the gallery space, the camera may act as a tool to structure the

experience in a self-dictated way that involves judgment of quality, likeability, and even

perhaps shareability. The befuddlement felt by the individual in front of an esoteric

work of art can become a shared reactive or humorous experience through the blogged

photograph, for instance. At the very least, the camera offers an activity to those who

find themselves completely at a loss of how to go about the business of looking or being

in a gallery: “photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing

something,” or at least “for giving an appearance of participation.”40

The assertion by the young Tate visitor that the role of the art audience is “to

take photos” suggests that photography seems a normal mode of mediating an

 19
experience that is foreign to many. It also confirms the spectacular quality of museum

experience, in that museums are explicitly places for looking, and that their contents are

especially worth looking at. Following Sontag's description of the world as a series of

potential photographs, museums are ripe places for this type of visual searching as they

are particularly pregnant with extraordinary visual images. For the young visitor, the

activity of taking photographs in an art installation seemed the simple and acceptable

thing to do; many adults may feel the same. However, adults are more likely to be

cognizant that photographs are not meant to function as an end unto themselves, but

rather as mere elements in the larger realm of experience. We are made to understand

photographs as a record of our experience partially because of social norms, and

therefore understand the taking of photographs as the mode of recording our experience,

but not as experience per se—and so, we rarely recognize the mediation of the camera

in our own experiences or that it encourages a type of visual searching that is limited to

the conventions of “good” photographs.

At the same time that the art museum promises significant visual experiences by

its nature as a site for display, it also necessarily positions itself as separate from the

chaos of visual mass culture through its specialization in aesthetics. The very concept of

aesthetic experience—which has the connotation of dependence upon learned

conventions of beauty and “artistic quality,” as opposed to kitsch, for example, which

appeals to unlearned tastes—conjures tension over the elitism of art institutions. This

tension has consistently resurfaced in debates about the museum's role in today's

societies of cultural inclusion and open access. One concrete issue playing into this

broader debate about elitism is that of official policies towards in-gallery photography

by visitors, which have no inter-institutional standards. Some museums ban

photography altogether. The Musée d'Orsay in Paris prohibits all photography in “the
 20
interests of the safety of works and visitors, and to ensure a more pleasurable visit,” as

described on the museum's website.41 The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

offers no official explanation for prohibiting cameras in the galleries, but director Anne

Hawley has explained that photography “just destroys the intimate and meditative

experience that was meant to happen [in the museum].”42 Total bans of visitor

photography are rare, however. Most American and European museums permit non-

flash photography of permanent collections, but do not allow photography of loaned

works; the major reasons behind restrictive policies are to protect artworks from light

damage and copyright infringement. Unfortunately, these concerns are not generally

made explicit to visitors, so restrictions are often interpreted as hostile or elitist policies.

While helping to distinguish the gallery experience from standard tourist activity or

spectacle, full or partial photography bans can also encourage anti-institution feelings

and behavior, and even alienate visitors. These concerns raise arguments that

prohibition of photography in the gallery space indicates a lack of awareness of visitor

desires and contribute to the unwelcoming aesthetic-elitist atmosphere of the art gallery,

particularly because many visitors use the camera to shape their experiences.

Cause and Effect: The Evolution of Technology

Digital photography, while deeply imbedded in the history and functions of its

chemical predecessors, brings forth a new set of issues in art reproduction. Inextricably

bound to digital photography is the disseminating capability of the internet. These two

technologies are arguably the defining characteristics of the contemporary moment.

Steve Tomasula discusses technology as it relates to the zeitgeist of cultures to explain

how technology and its advancement shape the way we look at ourselves and evaluate

our own modernity. In any given era, we “give form to a semiotics that matches our
 21
mindset.” Today that mindset is “one that is easily linked, disseminated at the speed of

light, re-arrangeable by users, icon-driven, interactive.”43 Tomasula illustrates that the

advancement of technology does not function as an end unto itself: “the technical

feasibility of incorporating images or sound into a book doesn't provide the

epistemological motivation or aesthetic reason for doing so,” but rather it “reflects not

so much what we see as the way we see.”44 As Benjamin suggested, “within major

historical periods, along with changes in the overall mode of being of the human

collective, there are also changes in the manner of its sense of perception. The manner

in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it occurs, is

dictated not only naturally but also historically.”45 Tomasula begins from a similar point

of view and, crucially, argues that illusory technologies as a “formal way of seeing”

“can also be an icon for culture” and that their claim to realism, despite inadequacies,

seems believable because “what 'real' means here is the ability to represent the way

people think at the turn of our century.”46 Now, fourteen short years following the

publication of Tomasula's article, our modern way of seeing is tied to a new type of

consumer product that allows for interpersonal communication based on the publicizing

of self-produced and self-acquired images and data bytes.

Information exchange today is both active and temporal. What separates the

snapshots discussed by O'Doherty, Sontag, and Barthes from the modern digital

snapshot is not simply their material form; it is rather their rapid communicability and

their resulting status as public social commodities. Whereas the printed photograph has

the quality of being a memento or keepsake, meant to be retained as a collected object

for later reference or simply to be possessed, to assure their owner of their tangible

existence (and the tangibility of the memories they represent),47 the connotation of

digital picture sharing is “one of transience rather than of permanence, a mere update
 22
rather than a record.”48 As Tomasula suggests, seeing and experiencing are intricately

bound up together via technology; in this era, digitized social platforms are an integral

part of that technological framework. Jos! van Dijck outlines how the development of

technology cannot simply be considered the cause for these changes in societal

behavior, but as a concurrent evolution:

the tendency to fuse photography with daily experience and

communication is part of a broader cultural transformation that involves

individualization and intensification of experience...individuals articulate

their identity as social beings not only by taking and storing photographs

to document their lives but also by participating in communal

photographic exchanges that mark their identity as interactive producers

and consumers of culture.49

As technology is an enabler of ways of seeing, so too is it an enabler of the

narcissistic impulse and the public assertion of self-constructed identity. When

O'Doherty originally described the “constellation of narcissism, insecurity, and

pathos”50 that is the self-construction of experience and identity, no one could have

foreseen the explosion of narcissistic fervor that came with the creation of internet-

based social media.51 The individual user now has virtually complete control over his or

her self-presentation to an audience that is simultaneously tailored to one's friends and

potentially massive, making it a curious hybrid between personal and mass

communication. Self-identity construction through social media is sourced in a

constellation of texts, images, videos, hyperlinks, and interpersonal connections; the

success of the websites on which this activity occurs thrive on the impulse, and indeed

the compulsion, of users to continually contribute to this construction process through

the addition of new content, either as their own threads or as responses to other users.
 23
Construction of public identity is not limited to the use of images of the self, as

identity-forming photographs do not need to be images of us; they can be images of our

friends or of objects, of things that belong to us or don't belong to us in their physical

form, but, transformed into an image, can become ours. The very semiotics of the action

of photographing—the taking of photographs—implies its possessive impulse. And, tied

to our perception of photographs as reflections of reality and their subsequent function

as invisible signifiers of their pictorial referent (reality), Sontag recognizes that

“photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces

of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”52 The blog allows for a

type of identity construction by which, in claiming images and texts not authored by the

self, those entities, as commodified media, can still be possessed by proxy. Like the

analogue scrapbook or album, a blog acts as a collage of images and other materials to

express one's interests, individuality, and personality. Photographic images need not

represent the self in order to refer to or define it; in fact, it is almost essential for the

user to include content authored by others in public self-construction in order to bely the

deep narcissism that drives the social media system.

In the context of social media, images of artworks function as one of many

genres of identity-forming material. This is the import of their commodified value,

alongside other images related to such genres as entertainment, news, or personal

narratives. The foundation of the modern museum system altered the course of art and

prompted a profound shift in artists' concerns, opening the possibility to make art

specifically for the space of the art museum—easel painting, installation, minimalism,

conceptualism—and also to parody that system (Marcel Duchamp using the gallery to

define found objects as “ready-made” works of art being the obvious example).

Similarly, digitization parallels a growing interest among artists to make artworks that
 24
address the specific capabilities of photographic reproduction and digital media. Some

so-termed “non-traditional” media, namely photography, video, and new media, employ

technologies in a way that defers the aggression of the processes of photographic

reproduction against the material work of art. Other media defy the camera by insisting

upon their own temporal and spatial specificity: performance art and installation are

both explicit about the necessary physical presence of the audience, thereby making

obvious the inadequacy of the image record.

Observing the effects of mechanical reproduction on images, art, and their

consumption, Benjamin wrote about the loss of spiritual art's “cultic” exclusivity that

occurs through reproduction. He explains, and predicts: “because of the absolute weight

placed on its display value, the work of art is becoming an image with entirely new

functions, of which the one we are aware of, namely the artistic function, stands out as

one that may subsequently be deemed incidental” (my emphasis).53 Benjamin intimates

how the function of art shifts as the rhetoric surrounding art and the way it is displayed

change, and how these shifts are continuing but, in some cases, predictable. As the

theory of l'art pour l'art integrated into both the study and creation of art after the birth

of the museum, so now, perhaps, art is on its way to acquiring a new function as art's

autonomy becomes, in Benjamin's words, incidental. Taking the place of art's

autonomous function is, perhaps, art's function as a social commodity, exemplified by

contemporary artists' increasing use of digitally-based media and insistence on audience

participation and inter-connectivity. Some examples include Chinese artist and activist

Ai Weiwei, who maintains a healthy microblog and encourages conversation with the

public through the internet; Jeremy Deller, who attempts to spark interaction among

people and to create public dialogue with his installations; and Marina Abramovi!'s
 25
stirring performance The Artist is Present, of which photographs were systematically

uploaded to an online picture sharing website rather than MoMA's official website.54

Commodification: We are all Complicit

Recurring throughout this discussion has been the topic of commodification,

which I would like to give explicit focus through a certain perspective: that of the

tourist. Tourists make up a particular genre of museum visitors that isn't taken very

seriously. We think of tourists as out-of-place, awkward, conspicuous, and clueless in

places that we find familiar; we dread the prospect of being mistaken as tourists in

familiar territory because they carry the stigma of being outsiders. Even Nick Prior, a

definitive anti-elitist and defender of inclusive museum strategies, bitingly describes

tourists in the museum as “hedonistic.”55 And yet tourists, ready to do and see things,

offer a constantly refreshed audience to museums at popular tourist sites; and tourists,

armed with their cameras, play an important role in the canonization of museums as

popular destinations.

While inside the Tate Modern some visitors consider their role in the experience

to be “to take photos,” just outside, the ramp to London's Millennium Bridge attracts

photographers all day with its picturesque view across the Thames to St. Paul's

Cathedral (fig. 6). Such views are planned to have this effect—London's brilliant urban

design has made it extremely amenable to tourism. They are an integral aspect of

attracting tourists and, through the dissemination of photographs of what we might

consider “canonical” views, cities build their reputations as picturesque and worth

visiting. As visual culture theorist Juha Suonpää describes in his interesting article

“Blessed be the Photograph: Tourism Choreographies,” “reproductions of pictures serve

as a pictorial world that confers on a place a certain hegemonic status as one of the
 26
‘sights to be seen.’ It is these places that emerge as destinations for tourist pilgrimages,

during which the taking of romantic photographs...is the ritual by which the place is

consecrated.”56 Similar to Tomasula's suggestion that formal ways of seeing parallel our

conception of what it means to be modern, tourist sights “as we know them...are a

modern ritual of the present-day world and its projection.”57 In other words, both what

we look at and choose to memorialize and how we choose to memorialize and then look

at things or places contribute to the construction of our experiences as current and

modern.

In cities with large annual influxes of tourists, museums deal with a certain set

of operating challenges: to accommodate a tourist public that may or may not be

educated about, or even interested in, the art at hand. World-renowned museums in

tourist centers, most obviously New York, London, and Paris, have a celebrity status

that mirrors that of the most famous works of art that are in their collections, which are

often draws for tourists whose concerns are to have seen “the highlights.” For many

tourists, however, the museum itself is the draw: popularity of such mammoth museums

as MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum,

The National Gallery (in Washington D.C. as well as London), and the Louvre, to name

a few of the most obvious, is in large part due to their status as tourist sights in

themselves. And so all of the amenities that surround tourist sights—or as Suonpää

describes, the “whole host of attractive accoutrements” needed “for a tourist sight to be

worth photographing”58—are important for increasing the museum's appeal and helping

to define it as a place worth going to, being in, and “experiencing.”

The multiplicity of the museum's different publics, as proposed by Andrew

McClellan in opposition to the treatment of a single mass public, is mirrored in the

diversity of institutions: “increasingly different in themselves, museums serve different

 27
purposes for different people; and of course they also serve different purposes for the

same people.”59 He proposes that museums can be both tourist sites and places for

scholarship—that museums can operate on several levels, deal with various publics, and

through this flexibility survive and serve a wide range of interests. “It is the diversity

and flexibility of art museums – their ability to give various publics a variety of

experiences across a broad museological landscape,” he argues, “that will ensure their

survival in the long run.”60 In an essay following McClellan's in Art and its Publics,

Nick Prior defends his clever proposal that “one can have one's (traditional) Tate and

yet still eat (in) it,”61 because while the museum experience is increasingly

“consumerist, global, virtual, corporate,” it is “still modern – an institution where

opportunity and constraint are balanced in equal measure.”62 In fact, it is that very

corporate consumerist virtual globalism that enmeshes the museum with modernity. The

two shining lights of the modern museum—Tate Modern and MoMA—infamously

thrive on the consumptive behaviors that they promote with their extensive amenities,

and have set the model for others to follow.

But if these tourist-drawing amenities are meant to “welcome those people

unaccustomed to the way of seeing and being of museums,”63 they operate to the same

ends of consecration of tourist sights that occur through the processes of repeated tourist

snapshot photography—with the important difference that they are concerted efforts by

institutions to promote the museum-as-sight to that public. In catering to this perception

of the museum as a destination, rather than as a vessel for experiencing works of art

(which subsequently is derided as an old-fashioned and elitist conception of the function

of the museum), unbridled strategies for inclusivity in fact reinforce a particular twist of

an elitist paradigm by fueling those behaviors that encourage the common

commodification of art and the museum experience among “unknowledgable” publics.

 28
The tourist is provided with amenities, the casual wanderer is given a list of collection

highlights, and the scholar can access catalogues; each target group is accounted for

through their appeasement.

The realm of interpretive strategies, in particular those that are increasingly

turning to digitization as a means of appealing to new audiences, also risk crossing the

line from appeal to appeasement. If the aim of museum education and interpretation is

to overcome the elitist tone of the museum's art historical roots in order to make art

accessible to a variety of audiences, there is an inherent risk in adopting the “medium of

the masses,” the internet, in order to appeal to a large public that is not accustomed to

looking at art, but is accustomed to using interactive entertainment technologies. Not

only does such a strategy align the digitized museum and its offerings alongside all

other bits of digital information, thereby reducing art and the museum experience to

basic resources, it also risks reinforcing in the minds of those visitors that a superficial

and image-based enjoyment, understanding, or perhaps even appreciation of art is

adequate because it is within their range of possible experiences. It does not remind

members of all publics that richer experiences of art are available to them outside of

their formal, technologically-mediated ways of seeing; the museum is not only a place

“to take photos,” but a site for the direct art experience that, in Berger's words, makes

all paintings contemporary: relevant, animate, and dialogic.

Tate Modern is, perhaps, the epitome of a certain genre of modern art museum

that has embraced an all-inclusive approach to its publics. As one of four physical Tate

sites with extensive interpretive programs, a dedicated online team, outdoor space,

multiple cafes, and a planned addition to its building, it offers visitors a massive all-

inclusive experience. The interpretive resources available from Tate are so vast and

varied that it is difficult to keep track of them—and to navigate their uneven levels of
 29
seriousness. Undertakings such as the recent mobile application “Tate Trumps,” a

digital card game that encourages visitors to gather images of artworks based on the

entirely arbitrary attributes of their “size,” “agility,” and “strength” (figs. 7a–7d),

undermine the purposefulness of Tate's respected publishing programs and scholarly

efforts, for example, because they simplify the art in their collection to image-

commodities for entertainment. To argue that a variation in interpretive strategies

appeals to different publics is only valid when each of those strategies treats the visitor,

the art, and the institution itself with integrity and careful, measured attempts to interest

a variety of visitor types without underestimating their capabilities for non-superficial

experiences of art. Otherwise, the museum experience becomes a commodity in itself,

distributed en masse as entertainment.

Caught up in this commodification is, of course, art. The commodification of art

in the modern museum is an enduring subject of concern for theorists: O'Doherty was

one of many to critique the bourgeois commercialism of the gallery, where “what is on

display looks a bit like valuable scarce goods, jewelry, or silver; esthetics are turned

into commerce.”64 And this is exacerbated by the close relationship of the art museum

and the art market, especially in the area of contemporary art. These dynamics have

been discussed in detail elsewhere,65 so I will not elaborate on them here. What is

specifically relevant to the present discussion is the particular commodification of art

that arises through applications of photography. To return again to Susan Sontag:

whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main

effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-

walls in which every subject is deprecated into an article of

consumption...through the camera people become customers or tourists

of reality[.]66
 30
The photographic reproduction's gains in accessibility, flexibility, and “ideal

visibility” over the original make it valuable; its losses in accuracy, nuance, and

“physical presence” problematize it. Despite its moral claims and its limitations, Sontag

is right about the photograph and, by extension, the photographic reproduction: within

it, the subject—the art object—becomes an article of consumption. Without the

preciousness of the original, with its potential for mass distribution, the photographic

reproduction is able to be consumed in a way that the actual art object cannot be. As

Berger described, reproduction makes “it possible, even inevitable, that an image will

be used for many different purposes and...the reproduced image, unlike the original

work, can lend itself to them all...images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous,

insubstantial, available, valueless, free...They have entered the mainstream of life over

which they no longer, in themselves, have power.”67 The contemporary popular market

for this consumption is social media as well as the internet in general, but picture

postcards, illustrations in books, images in advertisements, and museum merchandise

are also examples of how the consumptive value of unique artworks is bound to their

images.

Tourists may be obvious in their dependence upon the camera and comforting

amenities, but they are a scapegoat for all of us who are subject to the same distortions

of experience that arise with the centrality of the image in our modern ways of seeing

and being. Insisting upon the modernity and necessity of these developments that

position the importance of the art object behind layers of social and anti-elitist derision

is equivalent to colluding in the commodification of art and museum experiences—and

their subsequent degradation.

 31
The Virtual Museum: Questioning Realities

Photographic reproductions of artworks have been produced and distributed as

long as photography has existed as a substantial medium. They are integral to the study,

experience, and production of art. Photography in general has had a complicated

relationship to the museum: excluded as an art form, then finally accepted as a fine art;

a disruptor of the contemplative gallery visit as well as a method for structuring gallery

experiences; and a source of the museum's dependence upon art historical principles.

Developing now in the intersection of digital photography, the art museum, and the

internet is the phenomenon of the virtual museum, epitomized in the Google Art Project

(GAP), which provides freely accessible high-quality photographic reproductions of

artworks as well as virtual tours of some of the world's most famous art museums. GAP

tours (figs. 8a–8c) are step-by-step virtual environments that allow the user to navigate

through galleries with a freedom that is meant to simulate the autonomous path finding

that is possible in the actual gallery space. The photographs are not terribly high quality,

however, and the experience can only be as immersive as your screen is large. The

largest loss in the GAP museum is, most certainly, the temporal specificity that gives

life to the museum experience: online, these museums are immortalized in a past,

uninhabited version of themselves.

GAP is one tangible example of how formal ways of seeing—in this case,

through a virtual environment on a computer screen—can be an icon for culture. There

is little to no negativity surrounding GAP's digitizations of museum experiences, which

seem to be a trendy and benign way to navigate museums that we would likely never

have the chance to visit in person. This acceptance is particularly interesting when

considering the recent relocation of Philadelphia's Barnes Collection from the outskirts

of town to a new, central-city building meant to make the collection much more widely
 32
accessible. Designed to replicate the collection's original quirky arrangements of

artworks and other objects, the new building virtually replicates the original; and yet,

the public outcry at this move “to what will surely be a tourist facility in Philadelphia as

opposed to the school intended by founder Dr. Albert C. Barnes”68 made clear that for

many (though not all, as the move still happened), increased access was not worth the

loss of the authenticity of the collection's original site.

Why, then, does the virtual replication of the museum not seem aggressive? The

digital photographic reproduction has no directly tangible effect on the actual original

object or place. In knowing, or at least believing, that the original referent still exists

more or less as we see it in photographs, its duplicates seem benign. And in ignoring the

aggression of the photographic image—which is, as Sontag made clear, rooted in its

apparent passivity and its ubiquity—our lack of awareness of the meaning of art and the

museum experience beyond what is communicable in their reproducible images remains

tangential and minute.

The rapidity of change to the fabric of technological and social trends means that

even analyses written just over a decade ago, indeed even those that are just five years

old, feel outdated and naively optimistic about the power of digital media. One such

celebration of the marriage of art and technology promises all good things:

The virtual metaworld, or cyberspace, will become the principal locus of

communication, economic transaction, learning, and entertainment for

human societies. In it we will experience the beauty stored in the

memory of ancient cultures, together with the forms specific to

cyberculture...Features such as the demise of the author and the recorded

archive won't affect art or culture in general, but only those works

specifically associated with cyberculture.69

 33
What Lévy does not acknowledge is that through the digital image, art becomes,

unavoidably, associated with so-called cyberculture and loses its contextual specificity.

It is the very invisibility of that association and the resulting disconnection between the

image and the object that makes it dangerous for art and culture “in general.”

Lévy may have benefited from reading Benjamin, for whom the enduring

concern of art's authenticity is rooted in its origin and in its actuality, and for whom

technology poses a threat. Benjamin described the “aura” of the unique art object—and

how this essential quality of the work of art is lessened by the ubiquity of mechanical

reproduction.70 One writer of a photographic survey text claims, “Benjamin was wrong

about the special aura that unique objects have. Far from destroying the aura, art

reproductions served to increase it. Photographs of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa

roused people to want to see the original.”71 However, there is enduring significance in

Sontag's observation that disappointment is a typical reaction to experiencing the reality

of something previously known through photographs: it is, for example, highly common

for people to remark on how much smaller the Mona Lisa is relative to their

expectations. Not even considering intentional manipulations of images that

purposefully distort our perceptions of objects, the photograph is unable to accurately

communicate basic qualities of its original referent and so separates the image from

reality in ways that we often do not realize until faced with an extreme example.

Even in the case that people are roused to see the originals, the habit of seeing

the object as an image persists. People turn out in droves to see Mona Lisa, which has

become almost synonymous with the idea of art itself—a “synecdoche...representing the

entire tradition of Western art, indeed of culture in general”72—because it is so

incredibly popular, but once they are there, it is necessary to produce another

photograph (fig. 9). Since the painting's return to France in 1914 following its theft by
 34
Vincenzo Perugia, the crowds who have gathered to see it have been “'armed to the

teeth' with photographic equipment.”73 Today, massive crowds, frequent camera flashes,

barriers, and two thick panes of bulletproof glass stand between Mona Lisa and the

would-be viewer. Contemplative looking at this painting is today virtually impossible. It

may be an extreme case, but its implications are far-reaching for the future of art

experiences.

Visitor guidance does not only come from explicit tools such as interpretive

texts and educational programs. Guidance also comes from the museum environment

and the ethics of institutions. The commodification of the museum experience, and

failure to facilitate an understanding of the materiality of the art object, allows the

museum to lose its specificity and any claim it might have had to a distinct role within

society. Museums may be necessitated to play the game of commercialism for fiscal

viability, but this should not delimit the visitor experience. It is only with extreme

caution that museums should encourage indirect learning of art through digital devices

that prioritize art images; scholars of art should familiarize themselves with what is at

stake in continued dependence upon the photographic reproduction, for the resulting

effects reverberate in both academic and public sectors. It is too dangerous to invest in

the photograph as much as we do: habitual reminding of its limitations is the simplest

way to prevent the loss of our ability to see the real value of the unique work of art.

To conclude, I wish to reiterate the approach of one of the greatest proponents of

the direct experience of works of art, Martin Heidegger. “In order to discover the nature

of the art that really prevails in the work, let us go to the actual work and ask the work

what and how it is.”74

 35
Notes

1 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977), 165.

2 I am not the first to be struck by insights about museum experience through the eyes
of children. Andrew McClellan writes about how his “experience working with
underprivileged school children at a public museum...taught [him] that free
admission and liberal programming still competes with an aura of exclusivity
inscribed in the museum's walls.” From “A Brief History of the Art Museum
Public,” in Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. Andrew
McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 2.
3 Such as a photograph that is reprinted from its original negative or file and in the
exact same printing process as the original, which will still differ from the reprint
due to age.
4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, 1st American ed. (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 6.
5 Ibid., 7.
6 David Bate's very recent article, “The Memory of Photography,” Photographies 3
(September 2010): 243–257, specifically addresses digital photography in relation to
analogue photography, and his argument has significantly informed my thinking on
the subject. Much more material has been written about photography, particularly
snapshot photography, as a tool for personal, collective, and official memory. Some
examples include: Geoffrey Batchen, “Snapshots: Art history and the ethnographic
turn,” Photographies 1 (September 2008): 121–142; Lynn Berger, “Snapshots, or:
Visual Culture's Clichés,” Photographies 4 (September 2011): 175–190; David L.
Jacobs, “Domestic Snapshots: Toward a Grammar of Motives,” Journal of
American Culture 4 (Spring 1981): 93–105; Richard Chalfen, “Redundant Imagery:
Some Observations on the Use of Snapshots In American Culture,” Journal of
American Culture 4 (Spring 1981): 106–113.
7 H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844; Project Gutenberg, 2010),
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33447/33447-pdf.pdf. William Henry Fox Talbot
was the inventor of the first negative photographic printing process; the talbotype
was the first photographic process capable of making multiple identical prints, as
opposed to the concurrent Daguerreotype process, which made only a single direct
impression.
8 Sontag, On Photography, 154.
9 Ibid.
10 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5.
11 Cartes-de-visite, invented in 1856, became enormously popular in Europe and in the
United States beginning in 1859. Printed, sold, and traded in massive quantities,
they sometimes depicted famous works of art, but other popular subjects were
monuments, celebrity portraits, travel photographs, and fashion.
12 Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 4th ed. (New York: Abbeville
Press Publishers, 2007), 107.
13 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 30.
14. Frederick Bohrer, “Photographic Perspectives: Photography and the Institutional
Formation of Art History,” in Art History and Its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth
Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 249.
15 Ibid., 246; quoting Ivan Gaskell, “History of Images,” in New Perspectives on
Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 171.
 36

16 Rosenblum, World History of Photography, 240.

17 André Malraux, Museum Without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1965).
18 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Postmodernism’s Museum Without Walls,” in Thinking About
Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, 341–347
(London: Routledge, 1996).
19 Malraux, Museum Without Walls, 148.
20 Ibid., 111.
21 One of the earliest arguments against the use of photography to reproduce artworks
(as opposed to the preceding method of reproduction through etching) was the
inadequacy of early chemicals to register certain colors of light. See M. W. Marien,
Photography: A Cultural History (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2002), 77.
22 Barbara E. Savedoff, “Looking at Art Through Photographs,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (Summer 1993): 457.
23 Ibid., 457–458.
24 I use the term user to refer to a person who is operating a digital technological
device—such as a computer or mobile phone, excepting the use of cameras, for
which I use the term photographer.
25 Savedoff, “Looking at Art,” 455.
26 Ibid., 456.
27 Ibid.
28 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972; repr. London: Penguin, 2008), 30.
29 Ibid., 31.
30 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 31.
31 For a technical but highly informative analysis about the uses and implications of
cameraphones, which are mobile phones equipped with an integrated camera and
typically able to send digital photographs to other mobile users instantaneously, see
Risto Sarvas and David M. Frohlich, From Snapshots to Social Media: The
changing picture of domestic photography (London: Springer, 2011).
32 Sontag, On Photography, 7.
33 Ibid.
34 “The Question Concerning Technology,” orig. 1954 German, transl. William Lovitt,
in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper
Colophon Books, 1977), 4.
35 Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube (Santa Monica; San Francisco: Lapis Press,
1986), 52.
36 Ibid., 52–55.
37 Ibid., 55.
38 Sontag, On Photography, 10.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 “Copying, filming, photography,” Musée d'Orsay, accessed 7 September 2012,
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/visit/individuals/copying-filming-photography.html.
The full policy reads: “In the interests of the safety of works and visitors, and to
ensure a more pleasurable visit, photography and filming are no longer allowed in
the museum galleries. This measure has been introduced in view of the increased
number of visitors taking photographs 'at arm’s length' using mobile phones.
Reproductions of most of the works in the collections can be downloaded from the
website.”
 37

42 Fred A. Bernstein, “At Galleries, Cameras Find a Mixed Welcome,” The New York
Times, 14 March 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/arts/artsspecial/art-
museums-photography-policies-vary-widely.html.
43 Steve Tomasula, “Bytes and Zeitgeist: Digitizing the Cultural Landscape,”
Leonardo 31, no. 5 (1998): 341.
44 Ibid., 342.
45 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936;
repr., London: Penguin, 2008), 8.
46 Tomasula, “Bytes and Zeitgeist,” 342.
47 See Bates, “The Memory of Photography.”
48 José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007), 110.
49 Ibid., 116.
50 O'Doherty, White Cube, 55.
51 “Social media,” as defined by literary scholar Ruth Page, refers to “Internet-based
applications that promote social interaction between participants. Examples of social
media include (but are not limited to) discussion forums, blogs, wikis, podcasting,
social network sites, video sharing, and microblogging. Social media is often
distinguished from forms of mass media where mass media is presented as a one-to-
many broadcasting mechanism. In contrast, social media delivers content via a
network of participants where the content can be published by anyone but is still
distributed across potentially large-scale audiences. Social media often refers to the
range of technologies that began to be developed in the latter years of the 1990s and
became mainstream Internet activities in the first decade of the twenty-first
century.” Ruth E. Page, Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction (New
York: Routledge, 2012), 5.
52 Sontag, On Photography, 4.
53 Benjamin, Mechanical Reproduction, 13.
54 “Marina Abramovi!: The Artist Is Present—Portraits," MoMA's Flickr stream, 9
March–31 May 2010.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/themuseumofmodernart/sets/72157623741486824.
55 Nick Prior, “Having One's Tate and Eating It: Transformations of the Museum in a
Hypermodern Era,” in McClellan, Art and its Publics, 64.
56 Juha Suonpää, “Blessed be the Photograph: Tourism Choreographies,”
Photographies 1 (March 2008): 79.
57 Ibid., 84.
58 Ibid., 78.
59 McClellan, “A Brief History,” 40.
60 Ibid., 40.
61 Prior, “Having One's Tate,” 66.
62 Ibid., 68.
63 Margaret Mead, “Museums in a Media-Saturated World,” Museum News 49
(September 1970), quoted in McClellan, “A Brief History,” 32.
64 O'Doherty, White Cube, 76. See also, for example: Charlotte Klonk, “The Dilemma
of the Modern Art Museum,” in Spaces of Experience (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009), especially pages 206–211; David Carrier, “The End of the Modern
Public Art Museum: A Tale of Two Cities,” in Museum Skepticism: A History of the
Display of Art in Public Galleries (London: Duke University Press, 2006).
65 For example: Lawrence Alloway, “The Great Curatorial Dim-Out,” in Greenberg,
 38

Ferguson, and Nairne, eds., Thinking About Exhibitions; John Cotton Dana “The
Museum as an Art Patron,” in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, ed.
Bettina Messias Carbonell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Ian Burn, “The Art Market:
Affluence and Degradation,” Artforum (April 1975): 34––37.
66 Sontag, On Photography, 110.
67 J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 25––32.
68 “A Political Decision, Not a Legal One,” Barnes Watch, last modified December
2004, http://www.barneswatch.org.
69 Pierre Lévy, Cyberculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001),
126–127.
70 Benjamin, Mechanical Reproduction, 7.
71 M. W. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (London: Laurence King
Publishing, 2002), 306.
72 Donald Sassoon, Mona Lisa: The history of the world’s most famous painting
(London: HarperCollins, 2001), 215.
73 Ibid., 188–189; 2–3.
74 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in
Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to
Heidegger, ed. Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1964), 651.
 39

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 41

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 42

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 43

List of Illustrations

Figure 1a–1c. Illustrating the magnifying capability of images at default, medium, and

full zoom views. Photographic reproductions: Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night

(1889), Google Art Project. http://www.googleartproject.com/en-

gb/collection/moma-the-museum-of-modern-art/artwork/the-starry-night-

vincent-van-gogh/320268/.

Figure 2a. Photographic reproduction: Piet Mondrian, Composition with Double Line

and Yellow (1932). Online Collection, National Galleries Scotland.

http://www.nationalgalleries.org/object/GMA 2502.

Figure 2b. Reproduction: Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow. Image

source: DreamsAesthetic [personal website]. Accessed September 2012.

http://www.dreamsaesthetic.com/past/compyell.html.

Figure 2c. Reproduction: Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow. Image

source: Jessica Kelley, “Mondrian and Nicholson in Parallel [exhibition

review],” The Architectural Review, 24 April 2012. Accessed September 2012.

http://www.architectural-review.com/reviews/exhibitions/.

Figure 3. Photographic reproduction: René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is

Not a Pipe) (1929). “The Collection: Modern Art,” Los Angeles County

Museum of Art (LACMA) official website.

http://www.lacma.org/art/collection/modern-art.

Figure 4. Visitor photograph of Magritte, The Treachery of Images, in LACMA

gallery. Image source: “Ceci n'est pas une pipe, Magritte,” Arcticpenguin's

Flickr stream, 1 April 2008.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arcticpenguin/2413204174/.

Figure 5. First page of results for search term: “Magritte pipe,” Google search engine,
 44

11 September 2012. http://www.google.com.

Figure 6. View of London's Millennium Bridge to St. Paul's Cathedral. Image source:

“London's Secret” [personal blog], 30 November 2010. Accessed September

2012. http://londonssecret.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/chapter-thirty.html.

Figures 7a–7d. Screen captures of “Tate Trumps” mobile phone application, taken by

the author, September 2012. App produced by Hide & Seek for Tate Media,

2012.

Figures 8a–8c. “MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, 5th Floor, The Mercedes T. and

Sid R. Bass Gallery,” Museum view, Google Art Project.

http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/collection/moma-the-museum-of-

modern-art/artwork/the-starry-night-vincent-van-gogh/320268/museumview/.

Figure 9. “Great close-up of the Mona Lisa...” jttdr's imgur photoblog, 21 November

2011. Accessed September 2012. http://imgur.com/gallery/0tFRy.

Figure 10. Visitor photograph of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (1503–1505), Louvre

Museum, Paris. “Best of Paris,” Travels with Gary[photoblog], 10 April 2011.

Accessed September 2012. http://www.garystravels.com/2011/04/10/best-of-

paris/.
 45

Illustrations

Figure 1a–1c. Illustrating the magnifying capability of images at default, medium, and

full zoom views. Photographic reproductions: Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night (1889),

Google Art Project. http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/collection/moma-the-

museum-of-modern-art/artwork/the-starry-night-vincent-van-gogh/320268/.
 46

Figure 2a. Photographic reproduction: Piet Mondrian, Composition with Double Line

and Yellow (1932). Online Collection, National Galleries Scotland.

http://www.nationalgalleries.org/object/GMA 2502.
 47

Figure 2b. Reproduction: Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow. Image

source: DreamsAesthetic [personal website]. Accessed September 2012.

http://www.dreamsaesthetic.com/past/compyell.html.

Figure 2c. Reproduction: Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow. Image

source: Jessica Kelley, “Mondrian and Nicholson in Parallel [exhibition review],” The

Architectural Review, 24 April 2012. Accessed September 2012.

http://www.architectural-review.com/reviews/exhibitions/.
 48

Figure 3. Photographic reproduction: René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is

Not a Pipe) (1929). “The Collection: Modern Art,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art

(LACMA) official website. http://www.lacma.org/art/collection/modern-art.

Figure 4. Visitor photograph of Magritte, The Treachery of Images, in LACMA

gallery. Image source: “Ceci n'est pas une pipe, Magritte,” Arcticpenguin's Flickr

stream, 1 April 2008. http://www.flickr.com/photos/arcticpenguin/2413204174/.

 49

Figure 5. First page of results for search term: “Magritte pipe,” Google search engine,

11 September 2012. http://www.google.com.

 50

Figure 6. View of London's Millennium Bridge to St. Paul's Cathedral. Image source:

“London's Secret” [personal blog], 30 November 2010. Accessed September 2012.

http://londonssecret.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/chapter-thirty.html.
 51

Figures 7a–7d. Screen captures of “Tate Trumps” mobile phone application, taken by

the author, September 2012. App produced by Hide & Seek for Tate Media, 2012.
 52

Figures 8a–8c. “MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, 5th Floor, The Mercedes T. and

Sid R. Bass Gallery,” Museum view, Google Art Project.

http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/collection/moma-the-museum-of-modern-

art/artwork/the-starry-night-vincent-van-gogh/320268/museumview/.
 53

Figure 9. “Great close-up of the Mona Lisa...” jttdr's Imgur photoblog, 21 November

2011. Accessed September 2012. http://imgur.com/gallery/0tFRy.

Figure 10. Blurred visitor photograph of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (1503–1505),

Louvre Museum, Paris. “Best of Paris,” Travels with Gary [photoblog], 10 April 2011.

Accessed September 2012. http://www.garystravels.com/2011/04/10/best-of-paris/.