So, today was all-Louvre, all the time. I thought this would be exhausting, that we’d maybe do two hours, then break for lunch, wander around outside, and come back or something. nope. 11:30-6pm, walking through the museum, with a break for about 1 hour in the Denon Cafe for lunch.
First off, let me wholeheartedly recommend the 5 euro audio guide, if you’re not already very well-versed in the history of art. Very helpful to decode a lot of the symbolism, meaning, and structure of the art to the untrained observer. We also picked up A Guide to the Louvre, a 17 euro book that’s full of pictures, and further descriptions. This was helpful in figuring out what we *didn’t* want to look at, as well as what we did. Given the size of the place, six hours in the museum got us through very little in any appreciable detail.
What did we actually see? Mostly Italian and French paintings from 1400-1800. And yes, A_B, we saw the Oath of the Horatii. In fact, it was one of the paintings I enjoyed the most, particularly with the additional information the guide and the book provided. Saw the Mona Lisa, which is disappointing only in that there’s so many people, and you have to stand so far away from it, that functionally, it’s not much different than looking at it in a book. I was much more impressed by the … er… I believe it was the Madonna on the Rocks that we saw at the National Gallery in London, because there you could get right up to the painting, and see the detail.
Still, obviously worth taking a look at.
A couple randomish thoughts:
1.) It’s really weird to see how styles evolve, and how they percolate through the entire culture of the time. The level of detail of faces, or backgrounds, varies quite a lot, and periodically, you see some outlier in a given time period, where things either look more or less contemporary for the time, and wonder WTF was going on. One that struck me in particular was a montage of various arms and hands that, surrounded by portraits and religious paintings, was photorealistic in technique, but almost abstract in content.
2.) Most of the action in a given painting appeared to be almost solely along a single plane. Or, if there were multple planes of action or movement, they were almost always split up into several discrete planes, all of which were parallel, or close to parallel to the plane of the painting itself. I saw very few paintings that had a lot of movement from fore-to-background. In certain cases, this worked to quite great effect – the Oath of the Horatii, for instance, felt so planar that it made me think of the Egyptian story wall carvings – they both have some sense of perspective and foreshortening, but still felt very “flat.”
3.) Little in the way of what I currently perceive as “motion.” Sure, there were many paintings that depicted movement, or action, but they still felt relatively still. I felt like it was almost as though one took the opposite of Jack Kirby, where he always depicted things at the very apex of their motion – stretched or squished to an impossible degree. Instead of finding the peak of motion, it was as though the painters or scuptors looked for a different moment, when the subject might have been in motion, but had stopped accelerating, and as such, looked relatively still. Sure, that varies quite a bit, and I know that I’m actually used to representations of speed and movement that rely very heavily on the vagaries of photography. So, my observation is pretty heavily biased by the *current* representations of action and motion that I’m used to seeing. I wonder what someone who’s looking at both types of representations for the first time feels is more natural?
4.) Obviously, I’m pretty out of the loop, but I never see representations of modern life painted with such grandeur. Are they still done by anyone? Do we see giant portraits or recollections of events painted in very old-school style, or has that literally been made obsolete by photography?
5.) The other weird thing is, what happens to digital media, from a future archaeologist’s perspective? On one hand, if the media doesn’t lose all its information, and the data can be recovered, it’s relatively “pure” – it’s not like the paint cracked, or the original finish has been lost – but at the same time, I have a hard time imagining that future civilizations will be decoding jpgs of current-day life. Do we record moden living in a real physical, more-or-less permanent way? Printed photos? Newspapers, sure.
Anyway – my feet, again, are toast. I’m surprised we lasted so long in the museum, but it was really fun, and consistently interesting. We ended up walking through the 14th through 17th century French painters backwards, so it was really sort of strange going back in time, and seeing who the influences were on the paintings we’d already seen. I don’t have a strong enough recollection to really post detalis, but maybe I’ll look through the book, or our photos, and post some of the things that I really liked. (no photos of the Italian paintings, though – those sections were off-limits to cameras.)
One last thing – Every goddamn time someone takes a flash photo of a priceless artifact, I want to punch them in the goddamn mouth. Your idiotic, poorly-framed photograph is worth destroying this priceless work of art? Fuck you. Yeah, your flash on its own makes relatively little difference, but it would make relatively little difference if I killed a millionth of you, as well. Jackasses. I can’t believe how many illiterate, or just completely inconsiderate jackasses there are. jayzis. I saw this one woman wandering around, taking all sorts of flash photos, and after every one, she’d mumble about how she didn’t think the flash would go off *this* time. Gah. Morons.
Heh. The Louvre has killed many a tourist. I think you lasted longer than we did. I get aesthetic burn-out after too much art and just can’t take any more. I notice it when I just zip through rooms. If I’m not looking and thinking about the work, I leave.
But with the Louvre, it’s not like it’s down the street so, I you sort of have to keep.walking.and.walking.
Yay to the Oath! 🙂
Does anybody see the Mona Lisa and go “WOW!”? I think it’s totally destroyed by the crowds and the security. It’s overrated anyway …
2. That’s an interesting topic in art. Here’s a pretty good article on the early development: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_%28graphical%29
It’s such a basic concept about depth and such, but, first, somebody had to figure out perspective. They just didn’t think about it.
But even once they got some depth to the paintings, like with the Oath of the Horatii, everything still ran parallel to the surface of the canvas. Kind of like Doom. The depth is just an add on, but things aren’t really in full 3 dimensions.
Artists took forever to start using the depth that they finally recognized. It’s something we take for granted now.
(3) I would argue that Kirby-like motion is less natural. It’s too extreme for what you see on a day to day basis. And, I think the extreme motion is meant to convey a meaning. I don’t think that was a technique that a lot of artists used prior to this century. It wasn’t part of their bag of tricks.
I would say that what was represented by the older was the apex of any movement. Where the energy has been expended, and the movement is slowing to a stop.
I think Kirby would represent mid-movement, like flying along or the beginning with potential energy. Legs squashed right before a big jump or a fist cocked ready to swing.
I dunno.
4. I dunno. I don’t think so. Mark Tansey does massive representations, but they aren’t of current events (he paints metaphors meant to look like real events). Though he often paints them in ways that are similar (though usually monochormatic).
I bet there’s money to be made in that racket … hmm …
I don’t think it was made obsolete by photography, but maybe. It certainly reduced the need for big paintings to depict what happened. I vaguely recall a decrease in these works before photography caught on, but I could be completely wrong. I just can’t think of much of that stuff done at all in the 20th Century.
(5) We are fucked with this digital media. It’s not going to last at all. It’s a huge, huge problem. It’s tough enough getting something that can read a floppy from 15 years ago. Imagine what it’s going to be like in 100? How much stuff is going to be able to read today’s harddrives? Imagine an archeologist pulling up a harddrive from somebody’s basement. What then?
It does seem like there’s something to be made of modern, mostly-realistic portraiture. I mean, the difference between having something immortalized on video, or via a photo is that you do lose a lot of what the artist brings to the picture.
Sure, you get what a photographer might bring, but unfortunately, the best a photographer can do is either reality, or very specifically modified or attuned reality. One of the *most* interesting paintings I saw today was a painting of the betrothal of St. Catherine – in the foreground were Mary, Jesus, Catherine, and maybe John the Baptist (I don’t recall for sure whether it was John or not). If you looked at the background briefly, it seemed somewhat dark, thematically, but not completely unusual – but if you looked more carefully, and knew the fates of the people in the foreground, it was the martyrdom of St. Catherine and the guy (I don’t recall for sure whether it was John the Baptist or not).
That’s something that’s certainly create-able in Photoshop, but people don’t seem to be creating stuff like that. Or again, with the coronation of Napoleon’s wife, how the artist added Napoleon’s mother, who had disapproved of his wife’s coronation. Definitely possible via Photoshop, but because people aren’t (I think) really *thinking* about creating art like that, they don’t, by and large (except for the Weekly World News).
And then, it’s all digital, so it’s all basically a reproduction of nothing – the work itself is almost intrinsically valueless.
One of the things that I was thinking about, about a year or two ago, was that videogames, as a medium, are screwed. CDs and DVDs aren’t permanent – they have a shelf life of between 10-30ish years before the foil in the discs oxidizes, and the data literally starts to fall apart.
The carts of oldschool games will last, but the CDs and DVDs (and various derivatives thereof) will not. And since most game companies have gone out of business, or will go out of business, there’s no one that’s archiving that data for future generations.
Take your favorite game made by a third party developer that’s gone under – let’s say System Shock, just for shits & giggles. Unless someone at Irrational Games has that on some sort of archival quality format, in probably a decade or two, every single copy of that game in existance that isn’t completely vacuum-sealed will be *destroyed*. That data will be lost forever, and as a result, the art that was created gone, as well.
What then?
Re: Digital Media
Somebody has got to come up with some archival system for this shit. There’s big money to be made in coming up with a system that will stand the test of time.
Part of the problem is convincing people that archival is necessary – I mean, the movie industry does a lot of archiving of films and restoration, and there aren’t studios competing over this sort of crap. But for things like games, there’s so much in the way of paranoia about ownership and technological secretiveness that it’d be quite a feat for an organization like the IGDA or something to convince all the participants that they can safely participate in some sort of archival program. And the since it’s not really financially prudent for the smaller studios that go under to archive their data, how do you sell it to someone who’s only convinced about the bottom line?
Still, I wonder. I wonder if that’s the sort of thing that by doing a basic amount of research, licensing some sort of archival technology, you could get a couple people to provide a for-pay archival service. It would probably make a gazillion dollars at some point.
Why won’t anyone comment on the “Paris is for Louvre-ers” title? Please don’t make me be the one. 😀
Heh. I was l going to make a crack about the title.
Anyway, I don’t understand the comment about digital archiving tech being worth money; Corporations are definitely into backing up their data, but there isn’t much interest in archiving it.
The difference between the two is that backing up is about making sure you don’t lose your working set of data. Archiving is about keeping track of the data you don’t use any more for some future time. The first is clearly important to the bottom line, but where is the value in the second?
That said, the Internet Archive will archive any software, including games, forever for free. I think if you send them a game CD or DVD they will archive it, even if they cannot publish it for copyright reasons.
If we can avoid perpetual copyright, then one day anyone will be able to play these games.