Demystifying the Object

Demystifying the Object

I saw a particularly impactful video on Curiosity Stream tonight called Nefertiti: The Lonely Queen.  The three-part video explores the various complex issues surrounding the repatriation to the countries of origin or the original owners of thousands of artifacts housed in what I learned were called the encyclopedic museums of the world; The British Museum, The Louvre, in the US the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery. In other words, the major museums housing huge international collections gathered, one might say looted, in the heyday of globetrotting collectors in the 18 and 19 hundreds.

All three episodes are interesting and well worth watching, but I must confess that the first episode; Conflicts and Resolutions reported an incident so exceptional that it staggered my ability to give the rest of the series the attention it deserves. Not surprisingly, Nefertiti’s bust is a dominant character in the series, and a great amount of attention is paid to the security that surrounds the bust in her home, the Neues Museum in Berlin. That discussion is immediately followed by a segment with two artists who managed to evade all that security and, using a commercially available gaming platform concealed under an overcoat, create a high resolution, 3D replica of the bust which, with a high resolution 3D-printer, allowed them to create exact replicas of the bust of one of Egypt’s most famous rulers.  In true “artistic radical” style, the artists uploaded the code to the Internet so that now anyone willing to expend the technology and energy could have their own exact copy of the bust of Nefertiti.

I paused the video and sat back gazing at my own images on my studio wall. In order to share them with you here on The Wall, I have created high resolution versions of many of them.  Versions you can print out, mount, and hang in your studio, or wherever, creating versions no different from the images hanging across the room from me. 

So, naturally I thought “What is the difference between the original bust of Nefertiti and a digitized exact replica of the bust?” The queen herself might choose - time travel issues aside - to paraphrase a particularly germane lyric from Paul Simon, “‘The difference is all inside your head,’ she said to me. The answer is easy if you take it logically.  I’d like to help you in your struggle to see me. There must be 50 ways to see your lover.’”

It was late, and I am still dealing with a very graphic siege of insomnia - I actually dreamed I sang a song from South Pacific after finally falling asleep around 4:15. Naturally, I woke myself with that rendition. I share the incident simply to illustrate the current fragile nature of my internal thought processes, so you may understand how I jumped from consideration of the 3D recreation of Nefertiti’s bust to the idea of entire museums dedicated to exacting replicas of works of art that currently exist only as “one-offs” in widely spread “encyclopedic” museums available for viewing by only a tiny fragment of the world’s population.

Next I envisioned something like an artistic, global, “re-wilding” of the Great Plains. Bringing back the buffalo, but instead of millions of thundering quadrupeds, there would be thousands of museums with millions of paintings, etchings, photographs, sculptures, etc.

So, perhaps you will understand how I began to see a rather direct parallel to prohibition here in the states in from 1920 until 1933, and the current “decriminalization” of cannabis. In both cases the value of each commodity was directly related to one’s ability to possess it. Once the commodity was widely available and barriers to possession were removed, the value of the commodity took a nose dive. And the criminal world lost interest, turning it’s attention back to procuring and marketing commodities that were still illegal; like cocaine, heroin, and prostitution, or whose potential for profit, though often uncertain, was sufficient to attract the truly greedy, like bitcoins.

I was further struck by the notion that great art was/is valued, at least in part, by that same value-based dynamic. A variety of variables, collectively defined in a work’s provenance; who created it, when, from what materials, and, often most importantly, was the work unique? determine the “value” of a particular work. The more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that all those elements that defined a work’s provenance and value were usually not obvious in the work itself. They were of concern to, and even then often ferociously debated by and among “experts.” Our attention, however, is most often focused on the work itself.

Remember, the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty, and that is where we most often focus: Is the work beautiful? Does it enchant? Does it make me feel good? Happy? The point is that if a work checks all those boxes it is suddenly irrelevant if the “object” is an “original” created a dozen, or a thousand, several thousand, or a million years ago. Our digitally perfect bust of Nefertiti brings us as much pleasure as the original.

That is not to say that physical verisimilitude is the only variable informing the pleasure an artwork brings. Sometimes a work encourages one to experiment with an artist’s particular style or approach to creativity. That is often the case with me when looking at Jackson Pollock’s work. How? Why? And so I will close by sharing with you one of my homages to Pollock’s work. Let me quickly point out that the intent is to imitate, not recreate an "original Pollock."