large-arted bill

and for someone who enjoys "art and culture", i'm not big on museums.
i don't mind them once i'm in there, but theres a definite resistance to stepping into one.

but consider- museums are really the last bastion of classical art in our times.
mass media and pop art have left such little space for the classical in our consciousness.
its really the only place classical art survives as art.

the end of museums would practically mean the end of classical art outside private collections.
and come on-we don't want to go in, but we dont want to lose the privilege of CHOOSING not to go in, do we?

the louvre was the first collection to open to the public.
the people nationalized it when they overthrew the monarchy at the end of the revolution.
up until then, marie antoinette and her merry bandwagon of cake-eating nobles were pretty much the only guys who got to see great art. (tch..the masses could hardly be invited in to gape at the palace walls now...)

so with the revolution came not just democracy and a national identity for the french, but also their tryst with arty-ness (and boy! has it come a long way since..)

(the script is similar all over the world-museums in general are tied closely to the nationalistic movements of the last 300 years. no nations, no museums.)

the relationship with the masses is set to consolidate though.
enter the capitalistic goon, out to sell art to the upwardly-bound middle-class.
bill gates is all set to take art digital.
his company corbis is busy buying up reproduction rights to thousands of famous and not-so-famous-yet artworks and scanning them into a database.
ultimately, the aim is to provide art for people's homes in the form of high-resolution images beamed onto super-flat large screens.
(kinda like the ad sony that ran a few years ago where an aquarium had screens instead of fishtanks...)

so.. you and i could soon have ol' mona lisa staring at us from high-rez screens on our walls.
just one question for mr. gates though: why would i install an exorbitantly-priced piece of electronica to display the picture when paper is doing just fine!??

what this is going to ultimately mean is the corporatization of art.
it may also mean more money for poor artists-which is a good thing.

that the impending invasion should be american is ironical...
washington's national gallery was started as late as the 1960s by an embaressed white house who had nowhere to take foreign diplomats when they asked to be taken to the american national gallery! so it was not art that inspired it, it was national pride..

so all in all, its familiar isn't it?
the french democratized (louvre) it and the americans are all set to capitalize it(gates).
its the theme of our times.