Monday Report

[moon_custafer]

I disagree with pretty much this entire article from New Republic:  While I can appreciate conserving original artworks and manuscripts for research purposes, and I can appreciate the fascination with the actual artifact that’s been around for centuries, I think that far from reproduction destroying the soul of art, art and texts need to be copied, passed on, rewritten and adapted in order to remain living.

I also suspect, though I’d have to consult with real historians, that the cult of the original only appeared once mechanical copying methods became common and accurate (the essay the author of the article references was written in the mid-1930s). If it takes as long to produce a good copy as it did to make the original book or artwork, then the copy is just as valuable (in the monetary as well as the cultural sense) as the original, and no one worries that everybody will be able to get their hands on one. Basically, in the Curatorial vs Transformative fandom fight, I’m on the side of Transformative.

Meanwhile, an artist in Germany is trying to fill a corner of a 7,000-year-old salt mine with shelf-stable (as in engraved ceramic tile) copies of digital stuff, for the benefit of alien/very distant future human archaeologists: . Since they’re derived from digital files these aren’t “originals.” They’re copies he hopes will survive.

  I’ve no idea why Fritz Lang’s got a toy monkey in this photo, but it was evidently a day for bold choices. I suppose someone had to pair a monocle and a plaid flannel shirt, I just wasn’t expecting it to be an Austrian movie director in the 1920s. Lesbians need to step up their fashion game, is what I’m saying.

The chaperon is my favourite 15th-century headgear, because it’s a medieval hood flipped upside-down and tied, and (a) who was the first person to do that? and (b) how cool were they, that it caught on? Anyway, recently it seemed to me one could do the same with a hoodie, so I tried it out. It doesn’t form as dramatic a fall on one side, of course.I don't think Jan Van Eyck would be very impressed with me.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

I keep seeing variants of this:

Pundit: Social media has led to unprecedented numbers of people egotistically blogging and posting photos of their lives! What will future generations think of us, assuming this doesn’t cause civilization to collapse totally?!

Historians: Assuming future historians and archeologists are anything like the ones today, they’ll be thrilled at having so much information on the lives of ordinary people in the early twenty-first century! You never know who’s going to turn out to be important further down the road – some biographer may be terribly grateful to have the juvenilia of a famous writer! Also, if novels, the penny post, bicycles, the telegraph, etc. didn’t destroy civilization as predicted, the world can survive Instagram, you snob!

[sovay]

You never know who’s going to turn out to be important further down the road – some biographer may be terribly grateful to have the juvenilia of a famous writer! Also, if novels, the penny post, bicycles, the telegraph, etc. didn’t destroy civilization as predicted, the world can survive Instagram, you snob!

Also, people have always documented their lives insofar as it was possible: it's why we have graffiti. Do I think there are issues with the branding and commercialization of social media? Absolutely. But I blame that more on capitalism than on the human desire to have photographs of oneself doing neat things with one's friends.

[kore]

Yeah, I think in that article and a whole lot of writing about "online inauthenticity" or egoism or whatever there's a bad conflation between what's actually digitally happening, and how it's being set up and marketed. For one thing the social media companies are being driven by two huge revenue streams -- trying to sell consumer info to other companies (wildly successful!) and trying to get consumers to look at ads about other companies (not so much!) -- and the way they try to set those up has a huge influence on how people use the services, how the services are designed and conceptualized, only somehow the 'Marxist' analyses like this never take that into account.

And the idea that you can somehow kind of experience the essence of authenticity by participating in the eidos of Beowulf or whatever just seems so wrongheaded to me. There are so few 'originals' of what she's taking as the ideal. That Beowulf ms is the first preserved instance we have of it being written, which is indeed wonderful, but it's not the Ur Original of the poem. There might not even have really been such a thing. The idea of poring over unfinished manuscripts and going "yes, this right here is where the spark flew and caught flame, we can mark it precisely!" is pretty modern, IIRC. It's like that whole cult of Originality goes along with the myth of the Genius Lone Artist and makes me twitch.

[sovay]

That Beowulf ms is the first preserved instance we have of it being written, which is indeed wonderful, but it's not the Ur Original of the poem. There might not even have really been such a thing.

Agreed. (Don't get me started on Homeric epic.) I think it's fair to talk about the power of original objects; it's real and it matters to me, because it's tangible history. I don't think it's helpful to conflate the medium with the message as drastically as the author of the article did:

"I've spent years dreaming of these books, but when all five of us finally met I couldn't do anything but cry. I thought I knew them, through digital replicas. These books should have been a mirror, some kind of catalyst to self-recognition. But when I looked at them I saw nothing. I only saw the yawning void of everything in human history that I cannot understand, everything that has been taken from our culture by the incredible acceleration of technology over the course of my lifetime."

It isn't technology that took that understanding from her. It's time; it's the frailty of memory and continuity; it's the gaps between one person and the next, between one generation and the next, between one culture and the next; it's all the things you can never know about someone even if you can read their handwriting for yourself. It's reasonable to grieve that, to be knocked off your feet by the evidence in person. It's not reasonable to blame the internet.

(And you should never expect someone else's art or material culture to be your mirror. You can find things in it that resonate with you and you have the right to hold on to them, but—literally—it was not made for you.)

It's like that whole cult of Originality goes along with the myth of the Genius Lone Artist and makes me twitch.

I guess it's good to know that Romanticism is alive and well in the New Republic, but did this have to be the way it manifested?

[kore]

(Don't get me started on Homeric epic.)

//tries to plot how to get sovay started on Homeric epic composition

I don't think it's helpful to conflate the medium with the message as drastically as the author of the article did....It isn't technology that took that understanding from her. It's time; it's the frailty of memory and continuity; it's the gaps between one person and the next, between one generation and the next, between one culture and the next; it's all the things you can never know about someone even if you can read their handwriting for yourself. It's reasonable to grieve that, to be knocked off your feet by the evidence in person. It's not reasonable to blame the internet.

That's really beautifully put. (And yeah, why "should" those books in particular have been a mirror for her specifically? Gahh.)

I mean, I think there are actual Wrong Things about the internet and internet culture, like Facebook setting up its own newsfeed and refusing to act like a publisher or compensate news organizations, and the NYT grabbing reactions-of-the-moment to events off Twitter without permission, and Buzzfeed screencapping Tumblr posts to make 'articles,' and (let's not even get into the wholesale harvesting and sale of personal data without knowledge/permission)...but most of those have to do with compensation, and the worst form of capitalism where wealth is concentrated and clutched to death at the very top. And that's been going on a lot longer than the internet.

I think if anything the internet -- digital technological progress in general -- goes so fast it looks like some of these topics or problems are now qualitatively different, like the author of the article wants to think. But the problems aren't that new, and like moon-custafer has been pointing out the Death of Culture has been blamed on everything from novels to the telegraph. (I remember A LOT of arguments that were happily adapted to the internet being originally made about television. Doubtless they were once made about radio. Hell, I remember people fulminating against Walkmen -- "Isolating! Anti-social! Dangerous, your hearing will suffer/muggers will surprise you!" or even "How can people possibly enjoy movies if they aren't sitting in a beautiful theatre!" and so on.)

[moon_custafer]

I’ve definitely come across people who know about some aspect of their family history solely because they came across some old snapshot and asked “Hey Great-Aunt Velma, who’s the woman with you and Grandad in this photo?” or “Wait, where was this taken? I didn’t know Grandma ever went to France,” etc.

[kore]

Oh man, when there was a big surge in the US in diary-keeping -- I think it happened in the seventies, partly urged along by Anais Nin -- there were actual articles on "why should people keep daily records of their dull little lives," "how many of these will be reread even by the people who write them," "doesn't this point to a huge and worrying rise of egotism and narcissism in the culture," on and on. Same thing when people started being able to take cheap photographs on their own during vacations, rather than rely on postcards. There's still this fascinating (and enraging) rockbed belief that if it's not documenting the Life of Someone Important, it doesn't matter.

And going back to the whole "copies are not reality! This is a disaster!" thing, IIRC novels were thought to be actually unhealthy for people to read too much of, in a Don Quixote way. You can't get "reality" from books! or photographs! or online photos! or....

[readinggeek451]

future historians and archeologists... [will] be thrilled at having so much information on the lives of ordinary people in the early twenty-first century!

The Paston letters writ large.

[kore]

....wasn't there a recently published woman's wartime diary that was kind of similar? I think I remember oursin mentioning it....I thiiink it might have been this one https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/07/diary-of-a-wartime-affair-doreen-bates-review-adultery