Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Or, Snapping pictures of pictures

At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

These are guilty ideas that are impossible to escape these days. This is a much better articulation by what I mean when I complain about asking if someone has facebook rather than leaving a number scribbled on a napkin.

I bought pens and stamps today, which felt good because 1) I could finally afford to spend money on these kinds of luxuries and 2) I could put my hands on something, then pass them into the hands of someone else. It's a gratifying, long-ago feeling, this tactile paper stuff. It exists. I've been feeling lazy lately, then guilty for feeling lazy, about not having the patience to record complete sentences. Typing and pressing enter is soooo fast. Ink and postage is sooo slow.

Extra reading: Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes... Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

AND

Ways of Seeing by John Berger, which used to be available on Google Books. Yes I see the irony in digital reproduction making it possible for you to read these. They had these ideas before I did, totally last century.