Louvre Reflections
PARIS, France -- It doesn't have anything to do with the art. The works themselves are sacred; worthy of not merely fleeting disinvolved admiration, but an intense focusing of the senses, and an immersion of one's being; emotionally, intellectually, spiritually.
Far from disabling my inclination to be uplifted and my ability to experience joy before great works of art, my encountering of a seemingly endless stream of antlike tourists trailing through the Louvre in search of nothing more than photographic proof of their trip to Paris ( something they can download onto their PC's and show their friends back home) only heightened my own appreciation. My sociological observations and remembered revelations over my five day stay in Paris and multiple visits to the Louvre reaffirmed what I value about art, and accentuated the pleasure I took in beholding (for only the second time in my thirty plus years) The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne by Leonardo, or the dynamic and inspirational Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Unfortunately, for most, a visit to the Louvre represents not an opportunity for personal enrichment, but is tantamount to an excursion to Las Vegas; something they can tell their friends about to illicit envy. For many, the Louvre has become like an adult Disneyland, a place invested with greater symbolic than real significance. While children cherish and look forward to a planned trip to Disneyland (which represents the epitome of escape, fantasy and unencumbered play) , the Louvre represents the height of culture and a level of sophistication to which most bourgeois adults aspire.
On the subject of Disneyland it seems appropriate to mention Baudrillard. The "Procession of Simulacra" is alive and well and has penetrated his homeland as well as continuing to characterize modern American culture. Now the instamatic camera, the Polaroid, has been replaced by the digital camera. Thousands of indoctrinated denizens of the Occident (as well as increasing numbers of Eastern and Middle Easterners) have been swallowed up in the ever growing wave. Along these lines it appears that the majority of the museum-goers visiting the Mecca of Art known as the Louvre are predominantly interested in procuring the best reproductions that Sony and other icons of modern technology can deliver; they are not there to engage the works themselves, but to capture them, to seize them. As Baudrillard tells us, "Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate." He was astute in his analysis that "simulation... is still and always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of control and of death (.)" This enterprise involves not only a figurative destruction of the works themselves, but a destruction of our bodies and our senses. In the process there is a basic unwillingness, or more likely an inability, to engage the object; everything sacred is now only experienced through the veil of a lens or a view finder. Most will look more closely at their duplicate images when they get back home than they did at the work itself. Some will complete the mechanical act of downloading said images without ever attempting to even encounter these reproductions. It is more important that they have it or own it than actually appreciate it -- in these cases the mythologizing of life has fully replaced the act of living.
Indeed, the mass of these museum-goers fail to take anything of real value with them when they go back home. Failing to have been truly moved or edified in any way (again, this is no reflection on the inspirational power or artistic brilliance of the works themselves) these folks will take small satisfaction in a series of robotically snapped off inferior photographic reproductions of the great masterworks. Far from requesting an empty intellectual exercise of content analysis, I am bemoaning the lack of impassioned engagement of these works. As Susan Sontag poignantly put it in her landmark 1963 essay Against Interpretation, "What is important ..... is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more." I would agree that we have forgotten how to see and feel and that the essence of what has been lost in the encountering of art is as Sontag wrote, transparence, or "the luminousness of the thing in itself (.) "
For those ready to open themselves, this experience can still be had. The gift of the great poets and artists is their ability to transport us, and ironically, by embracing our senses and truly drinking in the physical world, we are lifted into the world beyond the gross material. And this, rather than mimesis, is the purpose of art. It stimulates in us a desire to live more fully and more immediately.
First, we must put down our digital cameras and look with our eyes. We must put down our cell phone cameras and listen to the live music instead. The world is happening before us, and the more we attempt to capture and control it the more it slips through our fingers like grains of sand.
