A near, dear, and wise fellow I know quoted some wise fellow he knows…
And art is dead. There’s been a sea change. Jack speculated that people have discovered looking at an image on their screen has become all they want from that image, and that’s a pretty good guess.
Ironically, that usually means looking at an artistic image of some sort on their iPhone, and Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying…
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
My reaction to art can be very visceral. Oh sure, I have better color acuity than the average male, but it’s not like I’m on LSD or anything. Just for example, looking at a variety of “white” paint sample chips, I can spot the “warm” one versus the “cooler” one or “greener” one, just like my mother can, but my dad cannot. To dad, they all look just white. That’s why I had a successful career in Digital Prepress Color Correction, and can see subtle color hues like the average female can.
There’s no good way to judge to what extent my better-than-average sense of color plays into the following, but my hunch is “only a bit”.
I was in a museum in Winona recently. Got as close as sniffing distance (figuratively) from some great masters’ works. Most of them were images I’d seen before – some dozens of times, some hundreds. Some images were new to me. But here’s the thing – even the one I’d seen thousands of times before, this was the first time I’d seen it in person. I nearly wept. There’s more to it than you’d think.
Here’s my point: if you haven’t visited an Art Museum IRL and looked at a really great painting in person (not on your computer or iPad or iPhone), you don’t know that you want to… but you do. You really do.
See also: http://stanfellows.com
