Comment by qalmakka
6 days ago
Exactly this. When I was younger they did an exhibit of the Great Wave and Ukiyo-e next to where I lived, so I saved the date when the ticket office opened on my calendar. I then found friends interested in coming with me and grabbed some tickets before they ran out. If you just put it on display every day it will just fade away while being yet another print in a museum full of paintings. You're denying future generations the chance love this print and cherish the opportunity to see one in person. Art is not just taking a photo and passing by, it's about appreciating the fact some human made some very special thing we can now enjoy
> You're denying future generations the chance love this print and cherish the opportunity to see one in person. Art is not just taking a photo and passing by, it's about appreciating the fact some human made some very special thing we can now enjoy
I personally don't get this attitude, but I also don't understand a lot of what draws people to museums when we have photographs of works of art. Which is not to say that I don't get why people view works i n person. I just don't understand neurotically trying to preserve a physical work when the author likely didn't even care that much or consider a more preservable medium to begin with.
For many works, even the best photographs don't entirely capture the physical object - particularly those where texture, including brush strokes is important. Many pigments can't be duplicated via the standard printing gamut. This particular work is a woodblock print, so perhaps photography is adequate - I don't know.
I'm not clear that the original artist's materials, with respect to longevity is really relevant, assuming the artist didn't explicitly intend it to be ephemeral.
Tangentially I saw this exhibition in Tokyo on modern ukiyo-e https://www.tnm.jp/modules/r_free_page/index.php?id=2693&lan... and I was blown away by the incredible level of detail the artists were able to pack into woodblock print. From a distance it looks almost like print, but up close you can really see the textures, and interestingly also the physical limitations compared to real print (the colors being layered by individually carved woodblocks).
With that being said, I’m sure they could make a replica that would be almost impossible to tell apart from the real. After all, this technique was specifically invented for mass production.
> assuming the artist didn't explicitly intend it to be ephemeral.
Is there another option? Even sculpture hewn from rock is ephemeral.
Paintings are not simple two-dimensional images. You can't view a painting from different angles from a photo. You can't see the light reflecting off the texture of the paint from different viewing angles. You can't get close and observe the brush strokes. A photo of a painting is superficially similar to the painting, but there's much that it lacks.
However, in this case, we are not talking about a painting, but a woodblock print. (Not disagreeing with your point in general, though.)
We enjoy seeing art in person because it better transmits the essential human creative spirit of whoever was behind it, in a way that photographs of an artwork simply don't do. This is one main reason why people want to see art in person, those who can't understand that maybe don't have the same emotional notions about art. I wonder if some of them are similar in mind to those who think an AI-generated drawing is no different than anything made by a human creator for their sterile, impersonal apartment walls.
As for why these pieces should be preserved even if their creators were sometimes sloppy about doing the original legwork. Well, in the case of many famous works, they're literal pieces of history dude. Choosing how often and when to display them isn't just about "optimizing viewership". These aren't blog posts or IG reels. It's also about saving their literal existence for as long as possible.
The worth and value of something, especially in art, is often assigned wrong in the moment. But on the axis of history, it has a life of its own.
Just 200 years ago, in a world without most of the technologies we take for granted today, art played a fundamentally representative role in stretching the boundaries of ideas, imagination, possibilities, and in extension, human cognition and social impact.
Preservation is the point. Art is made in the moment. Yeah there can be scientifically proven ways of longer-lasting / preservable mediums, inks/paints, etc. Pieces of art capture inspirations and ideas of the creators and pass that feeling along to future generations to also be inspired with new ideas for their times. They can be a snapshot of one place, at one moment in time, but they can also be timeless.
Photographs of paintings don't look the same as paintings. Dunno about woodblock prints but I'd imagine the same is true.
And if you’ve not been to an art museum you may not realize just how massive some paintings really are.
There's a nice Japan museum in the Netherlands which was founded by one of the greatest weebs of the 19th century. It's basically his giant house filled with Japanese memorabilia. Watching katanas, kimonos and Japanese lacquer boxes in reality is quite different from watching them in a book!