April 16, 2015 - 12:04
Of course there is an immediate inclination to say that art should be preserved in its original state, but I did appreciate the idea of art being permeable and open to the changing times. Especially since art often reflects the time period it tries to depict, it would be interesting to see the entangled comparison between how people of a certain time period perceived their realities and how people today feel about those historical moments. This would change the role of paintings from mostly preserving ideas, notions, opinions, and beliefs of a certain time period to being a representation of how people, customs, and “truths” change or continue.
Also, I have never really explored the connection between visual art and appropriation. Though we have been talking about whether or not people have the right to claim practices or ideas from other cultures or “own” them, we have not explored this idea in an in-depth manner in relation to visual arts. It seems that artists have more free reign to use visual arts to explore different cultures and represent various groups or peoples than writers. I wonder if some would argue there is more room for interpretation in art, but why is that? Who decided that visual art can be explained and decoded with more agency and fewer necessary assumptions than text? Why and how are certain representations more valued, for instance writing versus visual art?
Why can we, as readers, not be more involved or included in the text? Stephen Grenblatt encourages his readers to be more involved in the pieces on display in museums: “But we need not take that finishing so entirely for granted; museums can and on occasion do make it easier imaginatively to recreate the work in its moment of openness” (Greenblatt 43). I appreciated that Greenblatt said writes that changeability and instability are opportunities for resonance. Value does not only lie in what is found, but also what can be easily lost. There is power and potentiality in insecurity and delicacy.
Stephen Greenblatt complicates vulnerability and knowledge and growth in relation to works of art. “The vulnerability of poetry,’ Green argues, ‘stems from four basic conditions of language: its historicity, its dialogic function, its referential function, and its dependence on figuration” (Greenblatt 43). I think “vulnerability” is an extremely important word when regarding our relation to works of art or writing. This term references the other side of nuance, change, progress, openness, and involvement. I think we often explore interpretations and analysis as an opportunity for new perspectives or ideas without considering some level or the importance of preservation. I want to expand this notion of preservation beyond the creator’s intention, to how it impacted society, both positively and negatively.
Stephen Greenblatt describes museums as both opportunities for change and empowerment, but also for elimination and loss: “Museums function, partly by design and partly in spite of themselves, as monuments to the fragility of cultures, to the fall of sustaining institutions, and noble houses, the collapse of rituals the evacuation of myths, the destructive effects of warfare, neglect, and corrosive doubt” (Greenblatt 43-44).