Google-eyed

I spent three years studying art, four including post grad infact, in an expensive game of Simon Says choreographed by the spectre of a middle-class conscience, acting out the same progression to higher education as prophesized by this camp as a necessary chunk of the staple diet for career success.  Labouring under the similiar false pretenses as must burden the soul of a thrice-married lady uttering her fourth round of wedding vows, I spent a quite significant segment of my life fertilizing a hitherto wanton brain with useful pellets about paintings.  A kind of painting-by-numbers of pounds my student overdraft could not take.

Over the same duration of time in which I could have had four kids, settled with the council upon a decent nest-egg and doused myself daily in the cheap lager my child benefit would have stretched to after expenses, I remitted to a course of perpetual self-flagellation:- spending as many nights awake wincing-out the statutory word-count on 'French Romantic Art' and other more ambiguous titles, as those spent by those Eskimos in Norther Siberia, who differentiate Night from Day by the arrival of the Annual Summer Equinox.

Pacing oneself through the Jamboree of student-life, sustained wholly on a pallette of carbohydrates, varying my culinary intake by differing tones of beige, (The interior of my digestive tract must have looked like the magnolia-painted lounge of a centrefold of Good Housekeeping), I tolerated an invisible number of future delinquents and criminals - as is statistically undeniable, all of which I embraced for the sake of my degree course. 
       Which, incidentally, was a course I would in any restaurant, send back to the kitchen for a re-heat - before asking the waiter under my breath if there were any jobs going.

I loook back on it as being like an awkward slow-dance with my future self.  There I am, my future selfs firmer grip around my waist, cajouling with it, that yes, this is a bit wierd but the lights will soon come on and it will be less mortifying.

All this, I did not forsake myself to, so that five years from the day I joined the queue in my Halls of Residence for the Middle Classes equivalent of National Service, some anonymous Peter Pan of a Man working for Google would be now benefitting financially from staying inside on the ABC computer during primary school play-breaks - to have invented a catastrophic, grossly misrepresentational, Google-ated version of a real-life visit to a Gallery or Museum.

Cyber geeks have their own innocuous notion of being 'Web Artists'.  There are myriad graphic designers and talented creative types who can merge an eye for aesthetica with an understanding of web-vernacular.  Some techies (cyber-trekkies) are veritable linguists of HTML code.  They vary in ability from the big online hackers to the online shelf-stackers, as muchg as I don't understand their wizardry, (Which it is, and my ineptitude is testified in this website here), I want them to remain penned within these defined boundaries and leave Artists in the true sense, well alone.

Only a tech-luvvie would recommend how cool it is to be able to see any work of art in a museum or a public gallery at the touch of a button on your computer.  However, the ramifications of encouraging people to look at a pixellated, digitally coloured photograph of a work of art as like a vitamin substitute for the real fruit, are massively negative. 
       Having worked as part of the 'Emporio Arts army', I can verify that the photos of works I took at a gallery to then upload online, had to be processed through various software to diminish its qualities and remove it yet further from it human authorship.  JPegs can reduce a work of IMPACT in the flesh to a digitally homogenised potato-print version of its former wonderful state, devouring the human verve from which it came.  Destroying evidence of the true colours made from light originally which is carefully recreated in galleries and evident to the artist whilst he/she is creating.




Slow Roast Pork and edible friends


You cannot taste a photo of a plate of Eggs Florentine from Jamie Olivers website, unfortunate as this might be.  Likewise, you cannot transcend into the world away from technology, other people and distracting nouns, to that space which the artist protagonist has evolved over thousands of years of paint-stained, torturous, eclesiastical training, as is possible when you are staring gormlessly at the piece in real life.  Things stop when you can connect to a work of art.  A further plus- no pop-up ad asking you if you fancy buying a bulk-load of dietary supplements appears.

As much as the art market has worked on a satellite economy, art-works should also stay rotating around, and apart from, our digital ozone layer.  Informing people about art in cyber-bites is truly, important.  But so too is informing of what art itself is in this sense.  To be able to enlarge a picture of John Martins, 'Great Day of His Wrath' online, is good.  It's great.  But as much as music artists revolted against free websharing of tracks for the sake of keeping the industry open for new talent and retaining some financial bracket around what they have made, so must the artists passed, have their legacies protected. 

Great Day of His Wrath, John Martin, 1851-1853

Article on why Google art project doesn't replace museums:
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36934/robert-mapplethorpe-archive-goes-to-la-why-the-google-art-project-doesnt-replace-museums-and-more-must-read-art-news/

What Nicky Serota reckoned:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/01/google-art-project-classic-works

True say:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/06/google-art-project-virtual-masterpieces