Once again technology has led one columnist to declare the death of the museum. GoogleEarth and Madrid’s premier art museum The Prado have teamed up to digitise 14 of collection’s masterpieces at a resolution of about 14,000 million pixels (1,400 times more detailed than the image a 10 megapixel digital camera would take). This project allows users to see details of brush stroke and expression online that would be impossible in a gallery environment.
In The Financial Times of 16th January, in a column entitled ‘Galleries, who needs them?’, Christopher Caldwell’s enthusiasm for a joint project between Madrid’s Prado Museum and GoogleEarth led him to write:
“Should there be museums? Of course. But if we subject them to the same hard-headed de-mystification to which we subject, say, fox hunting, men’s clubs and smoking, and if we exclude social, traditional, moral and mystical justifications as somehow illegitimate, we will find it hard to make a case for them. Art museums will join the list of institutions – newspapers, for example – that are withering in the hot light of information technology, no matter how indispensable to civilised life they may once have seemed.”
There are a number of things wrong with this statement. Firstly, over the last couple of decades many museums around the world have taken great lengths to make themselves and their collections more accessible – even to the point of laying themselves open to the accusation of ‘dumbing down’. Art museums, admittedly, have been a step behind the general trend in museums to become more visitor-friendly but even that has been changing over the last decade.
Secondly, it is a brave man that heralds new technology as fundamentally changing the way we do things. I cannot tell you the number of technology showcases I have worked on in the last 17 years that have featured a fridge that orders your food automatically or a remote control that draws your curtains. We still go shopping and heave ourselves off the sofa at dusk. I suspect that in 50 years’ time we will still be reading books and newspapers, and still be visiting museums.
Tellingly, Mr Caldwell asks rhetorically: “Is the high-quality digitisation of the Prado’s collection not an improvement on the museum in every respect?” The answer to that is simple – “No” – because it ignores two of the most fundamental apsects of museum-going that the public fully understands; authenticity and a sense of a shared experience.
The notoriously snobby Louvre is the most visited art museums in the world, setting an attendance figure of 8.5 million last year, and the majority of people go to see the Mona Lisa. They suffer the queues and poor viewing conditions for one reasons – to be in the presence of a piece of great art. No amount of digitisation can replace that, I’m afraid.
And it has long been recognised that museums are social spaces that build and enrich communities. A bigger screen is not the only reason we still go to the cinema rather than watching DVDs home alone. Museums and art galleries have always been places to promenade, to see and be seen. It reminds me of the Victoria and Albert’s best-known advertising campaign of the 1980s – “An ace café with quite a nice museum attached”.
