The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.
The majority of the population do not visit art museums. The following table shows how closely an interest in art is related to privileged education.
National proportion of art museum visitors according to level of education:
Percentage of each educational category who visit art museums:
|
Poland |
Greece |
France |
Holland |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Source: Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, LAmour de l'Art, Editione de Minuit. Paris 1969, Appendix 5, table 4
The majority take it as axiomatic that the museums are full of holy relics which refer to a mystery which excludes them: the mystery of unaccountable wealth. Or, to put this another way, they believe that original masterpieces belong to the preserve (both materially and spiritually) of the rich. Another table indicates what the idea of an art gallery suggests to each social class.
Of the places listed below which does a museum remind you of most?
|
Manual workers |
Skilled and white collar workers |
Professional andupper managerial |
| Church |
66% |
45% |
30.5% |
| Library |
9% |
34% |
28% |
| Lecture Hall |
4% |
4.5% |
7% |
| Department store or entrance hall in public building |
2% |
4% |
4% |
| Church and library |
4.5% |
7% |
2% |
| Church and lecture hall |
9% |
2% |
4.5% |
| Library and Lecture Hall |
4% |
2% |
2% |
| None of these |
4% |
2% |
19.5% |
| No reply |
8% |
4% |
9% |
In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored; information carries no special authority within itself. When a painting is put to use, its meaning is either modified or totally changed. One should be quite clear about what this involves. It is not a question of reproduction failing to reproduce certain aspects of an image faithfully; it is a question of reproduction making it possible, even inevitable, that an image will be used for many different purposes and that the reproduced image, unlike an original work, can lend itself to them all. Let us examine some of the ways in which the reproduced image lends itself to such usage.
Reproduction isolates a detail of a painting from the whole. The detail is transformed. An allegorical figure becomes a portrait of a girl.
This is because a film unfolds in time and a painting does not. In a film the way one image follows another, their succession, constructs an argument which becomes irreversible.
When a painting is reproduced by a film camera it inevitably becomes material for the filmmaker's argument.
A film which reproduces images of a painting the spectator, through the painting, to the film-maker's own conclusions. The painting lends authority to the filmmaker.
In a painting all its elements are there to be seen simultaneously. The spectator may need time to examine each element of the painting but whenever he reaches a conclusion, the simultaneity of the whole painting is there to reverse or qualify his conclusion. The painting maintains its own authority.
Paintings are often reproduced with words around them.
This is a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it. Look at it for a moment.
Van Gogh Cornfield
Then turn the page.
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