Why
emulation isn’t (kitsch, or so alive and well).
I
will be speaking on The Challenge of
Emulation (An Antidote to Pastiche) at the INTBAU College of Traditional
Practitioners conference in London on February 17:
Pastiche
and Kitsch are out there, they are real, and classical artists and architects
should worry about them. They seem to flourish in a culture seduced by both
technology and realism:
Why
are these supposed marvels of digital manipulation, to my mind at least,
pointless, saccharine and just plain awful? Is it the music? The chirping
birds? The choice of Bouguereau? The 19th century paintings generally?
Arguably those paintings, with or without the digital manipulation, are
already kitsch. But techno-kitsch is the modern version. It fits right into our
engrained predilections for realism, sentimentality, and titillation. Our
emulative culture ended partly because art became industrialized and
replicable: blame Josiah Wedgewood, or Sévres. Combine that with Romantic
sentimentalism, a rather base penchant for realism (“You can see every hair on
her head!”), and a growing sense that anything digital is good, and you get
hyper-real, sentimental, pseudo-classic art. We marvel at technical
achievement. We seem to have a limited capacity to appreciate the nuances of
manmade imperfections, the multi-sensory aspects of a phenomenal world, the
notion of critical distance—no matter how verisimilar—that Old Master classical
art establishes between us and the subject. What, in the end, ever happened to
taste?
And
hasn’t anyone read Umberto Eco’s “Travels
in Hyperreality”? Or didn’t they get it? I find all digitally-generated
imagery kitsch—architects’ “renderings,” cgi filmmaking, Photoshop
collages—because they feign reality in such a naïve way. Bernini, instead, knew
that his remarkable portraits in marble could never (despite what his acolytes
said) re-present their subjects. He said himself that if we covered a person in
white powder (made them look like marble) we wouldn’t recognize him or her. He
simultaneously strove for remarkable verisimilar rendering of flesh in stone,
and acknowledged that, in the end, we are still looking at a block of marble
worked into an image.
The
producers of kitsch—and they are now legion, empowered, and seemingly undeterable—don’t
recognize that their screens are not paintings, their digital images are not
substantial, or that there is some value in acknowledging the presence of an
actual medium—as the painter who favors brushstroke does vis-à-vis the canvas.
Kitsch
is the industrialization of tradition. Its antidote is craft. Its nemesis is
emulation, not imitation, of venerable Masters.
For
a dose of poetic reality, watch Roberto Benigni pay homage to Dante. Brilliant.
And
for a slightly different take on what’s wrong with the 3D digitizing of paintings, from Jonathan
Jones:
A new film animates
classic artworks by Caravaggio and others to try and shake them out of
passivity. But isn't that where their power lies?
