Virtuosity

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, Oil on Canvas. Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.

I recently found the animated version of Picasso's Guernica (1937) posted below, on a blog, alongside the question: “Is Picasso scowling or smiling from his grave?” Cute question, eh? I think Picasso would probably feel two conflicting emotions; after all he was the master of dualities. On the one hand, he'd be proud to know how influential he is. On the other, the flatness of his works is one of the characteristics that made him cutting edge for his time, and this animation completely undoes, or defies that...

Regardless, to me, what Picasso would think is not what really matters here. As Roland Barthes says in his 1967 article, “The Death of the Author,” “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” While Roland Barthes might take this idea to an extreme, he makes an important point that getting caught up in what the author, or in this case the artist, would think, feel, do, or consider, ultimately stifles the multitude of possible interpretations, which are the only important part of a work, after the author has put down his pen, and the artist his paintbrush.

To me, the following are the real questions raised by the animation: Is our society becoming reliant on sound and motion to make meaning? Are we slowly beginning to disregard original representations, in favor of reinterpretations and reappropriations?

I don’t mean to sound like an anti-technology stalwart, or something, so let me explain myself.

I believe that there is a virtue in being able to see the beauty, the meaning in things that aren’t electronic, aren’t animated, and don’t have bells and whistles that in the end just distract. In a 2009 article written by Dick Meyer for NPR called “Literary Death Spiral? The Fading Book Selection,” he points out that sadly our society’s obsession with “computers, mobile, video games, and everything on demand, all the time,” has created “an aversion to long chunks of sentences.” He goes on to claim that “The dire problem is that long chunks of sentences are still the best way humans have to express complex thoughts, intricate observations, fleeting emotions — the whole range of what we are.” And I fear that the same is true for art. We are so used to things flashing, moving, beeping, buzzing, and capturing all of our senses at the same time that so many of us have lost the ability to be stimulated by simply looking at an “old fashioned” painting on the wall, the purity of which has respectability in its own right.

I have a perfect firsthand example. I cannot count how many people come into the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and look at the text-labels before even looking at the piece of art on the wall. Somehow we can’t appreciate the art without knowing is provenance, perhaps because we don’t trust ourselves, or perhaps because we have a desire to keep up with the “cultural elite,” to be able to post on our Twitter and Facebook accounts “I saw a Dali,” or “I saw a Picasso.”

I wonder if a time will come when all of the great masterworks will be turned into animations. Will that make the works themselves more or less valuable? More or less appreciated? On the one hand, these animations, like the Guernica one below, might make art accessible to people who otherwise don’t have the chance to see the work, and certainly might not understand it, but on the other hand might we forget about the value in using the required brain power to analyze a painting and bring it to life using our own imaginations? Will we instead rely on these animations that come with a song and dance because we’re too lazy to create the song and dance on our own?

I hope I don’t sound too negative here, because honestly my one life goal, the reason I have chosen to make my career in museology and writing about art, is to make art alive, accessible, real, important for all types of people. And so, if this little animated version of Guernica does that, then power to its creator…