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Comment by olavk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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