work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility

As with Temkins’s riff, this seems both an homage to Berger and a joke about how primitive his musings sound in a digital context.

We watch as he edits it, lightning fast, collaging in a freeway to Calgary, Canada and adding a cartoon Santa Claus to replace Jesus carrying his cross.

My favorite does both: At minute 15, as Berger talks about Bruegel’s The Procession to Calvary (1564) and how reproduction of it on TV allows us to change its meaning by isolating different fragments, Joe McKay shows an image of the painting onscreen in Photoshop. Some of the contributions to Ways of Something illustrate Berger’s material, some subvert it. If we discover why this is so, we shall also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.” As he speaks, Temkin’s clip shows a pair of hands leafing through the book version of Ways of Seeing-except every illustration in the book has been replaced with an image of Berger’s face from the documentary. On the soundtrack, Berger introduces the big themes of Ways of Seeing, saying he will reconsider the tradition of European art, but that his focus “isn’t so much the paintings themselves as the way we now see them. The video opens with a witty sequence by Daniel Temkin. The final product preserves the doc’s original soundtrack, with a different artist responding to each minute of the 30-minute film in his or her own style, a Vimeo-powered version of Exquisite Corpse. Its idea is so natural that it feels as if the internet coughed up the film all by itself, like a glimmery digital hairball: Mills set out to remake the 1972 John Berger BBC documentary Ways of Seeing-a high-water mark in outspoken popular criticism, with its Marxist-feminist critique of art, and a formative influence on modern media and cultural studies. Ways of Something debuted at Williamsburg’s always-interesting Transfer Gallery last month, the brainchild of net art guru Lorna Mills. Which is not bad for an initiative that appears, at first blush at least, to be kind of a joke. For me, it opens up the question of whether contemporary “network culture” is as distinct from “mass media” as “mass media” was from its old antagonist, “high art.”

These are a few of the minor questions that the recent web art project Ways of Something makes me think of. What does it mean to be an artist today? How are the new normal of online sharing and digital connection affecting how we relate to art? Are the old theories we’ve used to approach these questions even relevant anymore?

Work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility