By using this website you agree to our Cookie policy

July 2008

Vol. 150 / No. 1264

Tangled webs

‘NO JURY, NO PRIZE’ was the motto of the Society of Independent Artists exhibition to which Marcel Duchamp submitted his readymade Fountain in 1917. The phrase could equally be taken as an epithet for the inclusive but indiscriminate nature of the Internet, particularly from the vantage point of art history. None would dispute that the Internet is now essential for art-historical research and teaching. It enables blindingly fast searches of enormous amounts of data, and instantaneous communication, despite distance. The benefits of being online are now part of the everyday working life of all art historians and curators in universities, museums and beyond. But how has art history changed in the Internet age, and in what ways have things improved? Has art history caught up with what the Internet can offer?
When it comes to delivering existing content, the advantages are clear. Bibliographic research has become much easier, using abstract listings such as the BHA (Bibliography of the History of Art) and also exceptionally useful portal sites into a range of library catalogues such as the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog, or artlibraries.net. As a last resort, very obscure titles can be found via online catalogues such as abe.com, or through the providential eye of Google. Databases of published articles are equally important. Leading the field, Jstor is invaluable for retrieving items by author or topic. Digitised texts, such as those freely available through the website of the Warburg Institute, London, are among the most frequently used online sources. As ever the amount of information going online entails redundancy: since Google has been able to index articles reproduced on Jstor, bibliographic search tools (such as the BHA) are increasingly sidelined.
Not quite the same can be said for online research of images. It is true that affordable digital cameras (particularly those small enough to be concealed from librarians and museum guards) and applications such as Photoshop have transformed the way art historians collect and manipulate images. But the Web is adjusting only slowly to dealing with high-quality image files. Conference presentations and lectures illustrated by low-quality images downloaded from the Web are dispiriting; such images when viewed in Powerpoint are inferior when compared to the luminescence of a projected slide (but then neither of course is the real thing). ‘Superbroadband’, we are told, will change this, but for the time being the commerce with images, at the heart of research, remains problematic. Organisations such as Artstor, the largest online image archive (subscription only), are useful but can never be comprehensive, and also elicit great anxiety among copyright holders.
Graver problems arise when the Internet is used for generating new content, ideas and discussion, rather than simply acting as a vast index. The often-touted notion of ‘interactivity’ is one of the greatest misnomers of our time: ‘interpassivity’ is more apt. Clearly, it is because of the ‘interactive’ aspect of the Internet that it differs from the ‘vast wasteland’ of television, in the famous words of Newton Minow in 1961. But one has to ask what level of exchange occurs online – whether, for instance, online education is not simply an update of cheap-to-run correspondence courses. The decision last year of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie to re-build itself on Second Life (a virtual online world) was entirely at odds with the purpose of such an institution, and the results are lamentable.
Recent developments in Web technology, however, present more realistic and useful ways of ‘interacting’ using the Internet. An outstanding possibility exists, for example, in the combination of an open content encyclopaedia, such as is offered by Wikipedia, and research into the provenance of works of art. The scientific community has enthusiastically taken up the Wikipedia format for open participation in ongoing public research projects, by which anybody can post information or comments. The potential dangers of conducting provenance research in an open field are clear, but would surely be offset by the intelligently structured environment of an open content encyclopaedia (content is generated by consensus rather than by individual opinion). It is very difficult within the Wikipedia format for one user to corrupt the integrity of information that has been posted online. The moral justification for having an open public forum for provenance research is high. Not only provenance research but the exchange of technical data such as x-radiographs could be effected using the shared space of an online encyclopaedia of conservation.
Whether art historians can rise to such challenges does reflect on the public profile of the discipline as it stands. That art historians are the least inclined of all academics to blog is, on the one hand, a very good thing (anything to avoid the humiliation of unmoderated self-disclosure), but, on the other, points to the lack of public exchange within the field. In this sense, the opportunities and dangers of the Internet throw into relief the tasks of art history, in terms of the importance of dealing discriminately with original objects and real people, but also for the degree to which art history is a discipline that exists in the public domain and addresses topics that have broad public interest.
Presented with the ‘white heat of technology’, we tend to forget that the origins of the Internet are human, and that fact and error can be indiscriminately distributed; but this may also constitute an advantage, as an open field wherein knowledge (for instance the sum total of research on important works of art) can be developed communally. It is essential, after a decade of enthusiasm, to step back and assess what the Internet can provide, and in particular to consider the dangers of over-reliance on a technology that can only ever provide a highly abbreviated experience of the world. But it is also crucial that the Internet’s potential to make a difference to art history is imaginatively realised.

Presented with the ‘white heat of technology’, we tend to forget that the origins of the Internet are human, and that fact and error can be indiscriminately distributed; but this may also constitute an advantage, as an open field wherein knowledge (for instance the sum total of research on important works of art) can be developed communally. It is essential, after a decade of enthusiasm, to step back and assess what the Internet can provide, and in particular to consider the dangers of over-reliance on a technology that can only ever provide a highly abbreviated experience of the world. But it is also crucial that the Internet’s potential to make a difference to art history is imaginatively realised.