Vol. 150 / No. 1264
Vol. 150 / No. 1264
‘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.