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I kind of disagree - many paintings are actually better experienced on print or online than in real life. Just take your example of Mona Lisa - you will get a better impression of the art from a good reproduction than from watching it behind glass surrounded by hordes of tourists at the Louvre. It is a relatively small painting and you can't even get close! Many classic paintings are awkwardly placed with bad lighting and so on. Some museums hang paintings in multiple rows, so you have to be a giraffe to enjoy half of them. Digitalization on the other hand is typically done under perfect light and viewing conditions.

In any case, for most ordinary people it is totally unrealistic to travel to museums all over the world to enjoy the real paintings.

This is true of Mona Lisa, where you wait in a huge line to get 3 meters away from the portrait, and have maybe a couple minutes to look at best. Reproductions win out there.

But for Van Gogh, they do a terrible job a capturing the heavy texture of the paint. On flat paper he's a decent artist, cool expressionist style. But the real things feel alive; they have physical depth and draw the viewer into the painting. It's like night and day.

Oh yeah didn't mean to imply it was always the case. Certainly the physicality of the painting is a bit part of the experience, especially for the artist which work consciously with the three-dimensionality of the paint.

Fair enough.

To be honest, I have issues with the Museum/Gallery institution as it exists, but that's another story altogether.

My bigger point, which maybe wasn't clear from my post, is that Art is one of the greatest ways to express humanity, and by digitizing and industrializing, we will lose some of that human aspect.

>>In any case, for most ordinary people it is totally unrealistic to travel to museums all over the world to enjoy the real paintings.

Agreed. And I don't think that we should idolize the great works as much as we do. I strongly encourage a more local appreciation for artists who are currently creating ;)

I have a similar viewpoint - in that personally I consider seeing original art locally, even though it isn't a Van Gogh or a Da Vinci or whatever, is worthwhile anyway. At the same time, digitisations or reproductions of "famous" works can still be rewarding.

Same with music, while recordings of Coltrane or Miles (or 50Cent or The Sex Pistols or Beyoncé, substitute whatever your musical tastes encompass) are great - it's still also great to go and see local live acs - who're potentially awful - but are often surprisingly enjoyable.

Except a large part of “local” art is derivative, contrived crap. Much is good, but the benefit of large museums like the Musee d’Orsay for instance is that there are professional curators that can create stories with the selection of art. However despite a large number of inept curators on the local scene, there are a few Peggy Guggenheim types that have an eye for new artists that are masters in the making. I like local art, but there’s a non-trivial number of “artists” that are pretentious beyond their talent and they think they are saying something when if fact, they are as unoriginal as Louvre copyists. It’s a joy to find an artist that is really good, but the signal to noise ratio is pretty terrible.

I don't disagree but don't fully agree... Paintings can't be experienced in print the same as in close proximity to the original. You're right that in most cases for renown art you'd better of just just studying a good reproduction rather than have to wait in line and not being able to have some intimacy with it, a quiet study , some rflection... The setting is equally important in how you experience the work. You have to admit though that it's not the same thing, the layers of pigments them at different densities and with different strokes cannot be reproduced identically, not even close(maybe one day with 3d printers). Of course, this all depends on the artwork. Some get their point across at low res too..

For me it’s hit or miss. The Mona Lisa was underwhelming in person, and I saw it on a day when there were few crowds. Guernica, the Sistine Chapel (if you avoid the cattle prods), Garden of Earthly Delights (and plenty of the Goya/Velazquez/El Greco works at the Peadon), the Van Gogh room in Musee d’Orsay —- all worth a trip if you have the means.

The Guggenheim collection in Venice is world class amazing — in a setting that is more like the artists might have invisioned their work being displayed. Definitely worth the trip if you find yourself in that part of the world.

or the capella sistina. Trying to push you ass through a sea of people is not art experience.

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but based on your comment, I can only guess you're fortunate to have access to "great" art.

For people who don't live close to huge cities with big museums, the diversity and availability of art could be very low. Digitizing art and making it publicly available is a step forward for those people.

I manage the digitization program for a university library system (though I'm leaving this role very soon).

Yes, digitization is inherently a transformation and remediation of the work. This means that yes, something is taken away. But the value add, in my opinion, is so great that it's very well worth the money and time that goes into it.

My favorite work of art ever is Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea [0]: it fills me with emotion every time I see its digital facsimile. I hope one day that I'll be able to see it in person, but for now, it's accessible to me and billions of others to appreciate and enjoy.

> works are beginning to become 'instagram' friendly

Respectfully, I highly disagree with this sentiment. In my personal experience, I'm seeing just as many artists pushing back on reproducibility and the "prettiness" of art as there are folks trying to create works that look good on office walls or on Instagram stories.

> to hordes of people taking selfies with the Mona Lisa instead of appreciating it

Finally, again, I respectfully disagree. Who's to say that I can't enjoy art and take a selfie with it too? Many people like to add some sort of lens, most frequently their phone camera, to their experiences at concerts, museums, and galleries. I don't think anyone's qualified to tell those folks that they're doing it wrong.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monk_by_the_Sea

I minored in Art History and have a real love of art. I obviously studied using digitized work and still was able to fall in love and appreciate the majesty of it. But then I was in Florence and went to see David (something I had seen a ton) and wow it took my breath away. It was so much more amazing and awe inspiring.

Nevertheless, I still see such an amazing hope in having these works digitized at least to give people some perspective at the range of many great artists and to allow the art to inhabit a person's life in the way they want which is what the artist would want. And hopefully if they love it enough and it impacts them then they can go see it in person.

I agree that seeing a work in real life is better. But sub-optimal viewing of art is better that no viewing of art, and many art students have learned their art history via books and slides even before digitized art was a thing.

As far as the contemporary scene, it will change and evolve, as it always does. It you don't like the current trends, start something new. After all, the last hundred years have seen a decent collection of deliberate art movements where a group of people consciously came together to make statements with their arts and acts. There is no reason to let digital trends stop that.

> Reducing it to pixels for instant digestion is a sub-optimal way to experience it.

Sure. But actually seeing a work of art in person requires that you can afford to travel there, and that you can actually watch the work in peace. I am not sure what the best way to view a work like the Mona Lisa (to name an extreme example) is, but being jostled along in a crowd of Chinese surely isn't it.

If anyone's interested in this dilemma I recommend Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction from 1936.

One of the critical arguments that many are making here was access. Copies allow many people to access art opposed to the privileged. Benjamin also makes a huge case about the value of the original.

To go even deeper, I also studied video game history and preservation, and what happens when the "original" is electronic? Many people today are making electronic art whether books, photos, illustrations, music, films, video games, but we may also be losing much because there isn't much being done for preservation. Like how we lost hundreds of films because Hollywood studios did not care about preservation until too late, it's even worse for video games. On the plus side, it means anyone who cares enough will be able to preserve and write history how they want.

>is something that should be experienced in person.

I think thats true to a point. But when I first got a digital SLR, I went to MOMA and took pictures of a lot of art. I was able to go back and look through them. I actually really enjoy looking back through art. I often take pictures of the descriptive label at art museums and historic places.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but in the crowded place of the museum with everyone about, I enjoy the art, but I sometimes have a hard time processing everything. I enjoy a little downtime in the evening with my computer reading and re-experiencing.

I do enjoy interactive installation art, and that doesn't lend itself to photos.

The most amazing piece of art I've seen in person is "Christ of St. John of the Cross" by Dali at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. It's an amazing painting. And the museum is free.

Unfortunately, getting to Glasgow is not free for me, and I probably will never do so again in my life. Sure, great art is better in person. There's more great art than I have money to get to, though, so (at least for us non-filthy-rich types), digital copies are far better than nothing.

I agree, no amount of flat mega-pixels is going to map a real feeling of the physical art. But the art also gets popular and that means queues, selfies, noise, pushy crowd, security, glass. I dream one day there will be decent technology to experience the art remotely and alone with all senses, kind of VR where you will be able to see all dimensions, brush shades, surface roughness, reflections, touch and feel the material, in the surrounding and companion of your choice.

Personally, I'd rather voraciously consume as much art as humanly possible. This is a privilege only granted to the last few generations; why waste it?

Came here to say this. I took art in college but never really 'got it' until I saw Van Gogh's Mulberry Tree in person. There is a depth and a visual intensity that just doesn't come through in a tiny little picture on your screen or in a book. Until you've seen great art in person I don't think you really grasp what it is about art that makes it such an important piece of humanity.

Think of the transformative works that could come from making these works of art machine-accessible, as they are doing. I agree that viewing the digital version is not the same as seeing art in person. But this does open up new possibilities. In other words, I can agree with your point, but also think that this release need not be related to your point.

What would you give to have the Library of Alexandria back in digitized form?

Think of it as a backup, rather than a replacement or a dilution.

There is the aspect that if you want to study the artist (rather than individual works), then having access to such huge body of their work is immensely useful and can provide great context for individual works. This is something that would be very difficult to achieve without these sorts digitization efforts.