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

[kore]

-- 1930s article hahaha WAIT, is it the Walter Benjamin one?

HAHAHA IT IS, HOW DID I FUCKING KNOW

Poor Benjamin, he is so constantly mistreated by wannabe academics. I want to forbid them to stop quoting him for fifty years.


Seeing the earliest European book alone would be the event of a lifetime, for a certain kind of museum-goer. But for this viewer, the main attraction lay in a quiet little vitrine: all four Old English poetic codices, side by side. They don’t look that impressive to the casual eye.

oh my God you fucking snob

There’s no outward sign of how important they are, how unprecedented their meeting.

yes yes nobody can tell but You can, and you shall proceed to Enlighten us and also get paid for it, oh do go on

the concept of the original—a concept we have almost entirely lost touch with.

We live in a world where Bill Gates bought a da Vinci notebook for like 30M but yes, really, do go on (he then released a digital scan free on the internet!....no, I see why you wouldn't like this comparison)

The Beowulf Manuscript is not just composed of words that serve as the basis for every translation of the epic poem. It’s foremost an object, the only one of its kind. It is not merely a representation of a story; it is the story

WTF? and also no. You can say drivel like that about some actual fantastic manuscripts -- Keats's ode to a Nightingale is my fave -- but from what I know the ms we have is a transcript of another manuscript so it is ACTUALLY A COPY, hah. And let's not even get into the argument whether or not it's a transcription of an oral epic (my vote). And here we're getting into a whole thing about original artistic work from the brain of one (1) individual v oral tradition that takes place via improvisation and repeated refrains over years which is completely prejudicing your worldview, but ANYWAY.

(The original Cotton collection was kept, with a horrible kind of accuracy, in a building called Ashburnham House.)

OH FOR GOD'S SAKE. It just SOUNDS that way to you, because you are IGNORANT. "Ashburnham House" was called that because it was leased by Charles Ashburnham who was related to Charles I's John Ashburnham who had his estates IN Ashburnham, which was named after the Ashbourne stream which powered the Ashburnham Forge. "Ham" means village but in this case might also be "hamm" which specifically refers to something set in the bend of a river, LIKE A FORGE IIRC. So it's Ashbourne + ham, and has fucking nothing to do with ashes and burning, because in Britain "ash" as a place name means BY ASH TREES. Ashbourne, Ashburnham, Ashburton, Ashbury, Ashby, Ashley, Ashmore, I COULD GO ON. Ashfield does not mean FIELD OF ASHES FROM A FIRE. The name could even be a derivative or warping of Ashbourne, and in the first record of it in the Domesday Book it's ESSEBURN, from Old English aesc + burna, meaning "stream where the ash-trees grow." So saith the OUP Dictionary of English Place Names anyway.

AND LET'S NOT EVEN GO INTO VARIANT SPELLINGS. YOU WANT VARIANT SPELLINGS?Ashburnham, Asbury, Astbury, Ashburner, Ashbourn, Ashburn, Ashburnam, Ashburham, Ashbourne, Ashborn -- don't all the "original" examples we have of Shakespeare's signature show variant spellings? HMMM. So to clarify, ASH here means TREE, BURN means STREAM, and it is about as "accurate" as IDEFK, some other dumb Romantic idea cooked up on the total lack of etymology.

Why are these the manuscripts that have survived

PURE CHANCE, lots of the time, sorry to say. Or from the nice paper being used for something else, and then hundreds of years later "Hey what's this writing on the back of this...."

In 2018, we are in a much more elaborate and abstracted phase of Benjamin’s reproduction theory. We are accustomed to reading without reference to any physical object specific to the act of reading

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.

OH, CHRIST ALMIGHTY

WHAT?

//dissolves into sputtering froth

[sovay]

I disagree with pretty much this entire article from New Republic

I disagreed from the moment the author says we've lost touch with the concept of the original and it just kind of went from there.

I’ve no idea why Fritz Lang’s got a toy monkey in this photo, but it was evidently a day for bold choices.

Thank you; that's adorable.

[kore]

....wow sorry, I had no idea all that froth added up to that much tl;dr. I mean, she might maybe, MAYBE have a point with the whole "our culture now is digital so we're not used to the idea of writing/reading original manuscripts"? But the truth is I've seen variants of that argument used against reproductions as various as mass market paperbacks, coloured mass prints of famous paintings (oh boy you should see the nasty cultural warfare that still goes on over that), typewritten mss instead of handwritten ones, and typically the argument gets mixed up between 'authenticity' and 'mass production'. Yeah it's a little depressing if you go to say a rock concert and see a sea of people holding up their phones and looking at the digital image, but that's happened ever since there were cameras, and people were looking through the lens at what they hoped to see represented rather than the "actual" thing. I mean if we REALLY want to go into the "actual reality" thing, everything we see should be upside down, mechanically speaking, because that's the image projected on the retina is inverted because the structure of our eye's lens is convex. Any more of that and we start slogging into Kantian turf of how much how we perceive influences what we are perceiving and that just turns into an unholy mess.

(EVERYONE cries when they get in front of famous arworks, because no, the reproduction can't really convey it. But that's Stendhal syndrome back in the 19th century! Way before even poor Walter Benjamin. What would he think of his arguments being so lifelessly and inaccurately reproduced to power such shitty articles. I'm always disappointed that nobody ever references Thomas Mann's writing about gramophone records in The Magic Mountain. That beats out Benjamin's essay by about 12 years!) (....and oh boy, this whole argument in the context of musical recordings, and the recording practices nowadays of digitally patching together a lot of different renditions to make one Super-recording, also gets really ugly.)

art and texts need to be copied, passed on, rewritten and adapted in order to remain living.

Yeah. Also this person needs to be bopped on the nose with a copy of Ways of Seeing. Also also, although I was pretty disquieted myself at the move from typed 'originals' to working on digital 'copies' only visible on a machine, I REALLY don't think this maps to original mss the way she thinks it does. Benjamin is talking about photography, and film, and Berger later on is taking up the theory of mass production, with some heavy duty Marxist theory about alienation. I mean Benjamin sounds like some 21st-century snob talking about blogging for God's sake

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing.