During my journey through Johnson’s Art Museum on Saturday I can’t help but notice the detail of prints. In days that lack computers or modern photography, prints were used to depict realistic images of the world around them. The artistry, level of accuracy, and scope of these works are inspiring and I can’t help but wonder if artists today can become masters of prints as much as these artists did.
While I am sure there are some people today who can replicate the quality of prints made centuries ago, I wonder what is the difference in the number of the people who has this skill. Out of the populations in the past, what is the percentage of them that know how to make prints.
As technology improves, how many skills are lost due to their lack of usage? Even though the thought that there are an infinite number of skills that has been lost through the centuries is a little bit disheartening, that is the price of “progress”. I guess the art of creating print documentation is replaced by knowledge on how to Photoshop, take pictures with iphones, and how to take pictures under microscopes. What would these technologies be replaced by a hundred years from now? 3-d sculpting? Virtual reality landscape painting?
Our documentation of imagery becomes more realistic every year. With that realism, there is an increase in accuracy in terms of depicting what is real. However we have to be careful to notice that soon the images that we create are no longer just real but realistically distorted, ultimately painting an unrealistic expectation of what is real. Perhaps it is then we should look back at print artworks and realize what is real imagery at its most basic form.
Very interesting post. I went to the museum once, during a trip in a FWS. I found the museum to be incredibly interesting and loved the detail that each image depicted.
Thinking about how technology has influenced art is fascinating. Before any modern technology, artists spent weeks perfecting portraits of leaders/wealthy, and these are the only images we have of those people. These days, you can take a picture in a fraction of a second, and have it exist forever digitally. This really embodies how different life as a whole is in this age of technology.
I remember learning about printmaking in art class years ago. It involved an incredible amount of skill as the image had to be carved out backwards for each color that was used in the print, and the order of the colors had to be carefully considered.
Hi, I think you bring up some very interesting points regarding the function of museums during an age of technology and how do we find a way to balance those two, especially relevant when we consider archiving images of work and those images becoming the main source of experiencing work. You also touch on a very important point regarding craftsmanship and art making. I wouldn’t be too concerned about losing the materiality of work to technology because the hand will always remain a very important decision for many artists in their career. I think you are broaching more of a question attempting to identify the direction art is currently taking, one that is about how mediums are used as a means to an end, a way to articulate a concept, rather than as a technical specificity. This would explain the shift from illustration (or masterworks from Renaissance period) to conceptual art, which is still somewhat very present in contemporary art.