Since we're talking about Fra Angelico and Google today:
Eric Fischl spoke recently at a symposium hosted by the Phillips Collection and, while I wasn't able to attend, through the magic of live streaming I kept my eye on it while I was at work. There wasn't enough of a local angle for me to report on it and I pitched it to late to Artforum to put it on their calendar so, anyway, you don't care about why but I did not end up writing about it. Which is too bad—it was chock full of panels about culture and its role in diplomacy and how often do you find Sen. John Kerry and Eric Fischl speaking at the same venue?
What I caught was maddening—specifically, Fischl's presentation. His attitude toward the image and its physical construction was both elite and frustratingly common. (Nope—pno immediate application to diplomacy. If I had to guess, the moderator asked an open-ended question, and Fischl responded to it, as all artists respond to open-ended questions, with a free-form Heideggerian rap on the "what is art?" question.)
I didn't take notes on what he said, but in essence Fischl believes that a viewer can only learn about an artwork by seeing it in person. Now, this raises on one hand a lot of thorny epistemological concerns about how you know that you're seeing an artwork: Does it make a difference if it's on a crowded Metro platform or in a quiet museum, what if the lights are low or too bright, what if you are sick that day, whatever whatever.
But putting those considerations aside, in my lived experience I know Fischl to be wrong. I learned about art at Borders Books and Music. In high school, having no money to speak of and nothing at all to do, I parked my ass in either the tiny poetry corner or the tiny art and photography corner and learned—to the limit of my ability and station and as far as Borders managers' patience would allow—about art history. It was awesome and informed my later experiences. (I didn't discover libraries until college.)
Today it reminds me of one of Fra Angelico's innovations, the sacra conversazione. In this fresco Fra Angelico did away with the hierarchical presentation of the saints that until then dominated this sort of painting (Virgin Mother, Christ Child, and guests). In part that owed to the discovery of linear perspective and the prominence of architecture in the early Quattrocento (see, for example, and really for the best example, Masaccio's Trinity). But it certainly represented a humanization of figures that previously congregated in a sort of celestial promenade around the Holy Fam. Fra Angelico didn't labor over the metaphysics of the representation of God. He brought the holy figures home.
A gazillion years later we are still debating the metaphysics of seeing and representation, and that's fine and good, but let's not let that debate at the margin interfere with the teaching of art in the main. To say that a viewer only learns about art by seeing it is to restrict the available audience to the tiny clerical class who is able to afford the immense costs associated with Art Basel Miami Beach, or, hell, getting into MoMA.
In fact you can learn a great deal from models. I "understood" Julie Mehretu's work before I ever saw it and I probably gained that knowledge from a 500-px width image. Deal with it. I would guess that art education is actually hindered by the lack of a comprehensive Google Image Search or its equivalent. There is no good way to use the tools at our disposal to process art and kids who no longer idly browse the shelves at Borders don't have a better contemporary alternative.
(Sorry to beat up on old Eric Fischl and not represent his whole argument. I apologize for making him a bit of a strawman here but I do not think I am mischaracterizing his comments.)
How come Google sucks so much at sorting images? Google is building a digital library whose collection includes every book ever written. That's awesome. Is it too much to ask that this Library of Alexandria in the Cloud include a slide collection?
It's quite apparent to me that it is Google's job to build an online catalogue raisonné for every artist who has ever made artworks. So I'm frustrated that I am not browsing a comprehensive collection of the frescoes of Fra Angelico right this minute. But further I'm baffled that Google isn't even working on it. To my knowledge there is no "artist:Fra+Angelico" search tool in the works to bring me the slides that I otherwise need to find through Amazon or, God forbid, an art school library.
Do I have to look to Bing? Is the problem copyrights? I'm sick of Google Image Search not turning up the image I need but further I'm tired of not having a Google Artist Search. It should be simple, insofar as it is a minor task relative to compiling every book ever written, ever. Just stick the pictures in the cloud already!
Back when I first moved to the District I would go by the art libraries of schools who didn't know me from Adam and bother them into letting me check out slide trays. Back then, anyway, it was an important part of my diet: memorizing slides by artist, by period, by genre. (Today I'm totally lazy.) In any event, it was a needlessly complicated and time-consuming way to go about finding the images I want.
So where is Google Artist Search already?
