Is It Really Art?

Regarding “In Cyberspace, Can Anyone Really Appreciate Art?� by Suzanne Muchnic (April 3):

Putting art on CD-ROM may be a good tool for scholarship and study--I imagine how valuable it would be to call up all of Gauguin’s paintings of a five-year period and compare them with his works of the next five years to see what type of discoveries he was making about space; I could access his writings, contemporary criticism; identify the location of the works; read excerpts from monographs, and I could do this with a multitude of artists--what a tool!

Still, I am saddened by the article. First, it was so obviously concerned with money, from the capitalist making money off images of his collection to the talk of licenses and copyrights. Nothing was said of the limitations of the digitalized image.

Ah, here is the problem. I fear there is a great confusion when the sensual reality of a work of art becomes subservient to its worth as a commodity: How can a CD-ROM image show us the difference between the etched line, the engraved line, the graphite line, the sumi ink line, the line that is the fingerprint of the artists? The sensual methodology of an artwork is as important as the content.

I would suggest (despite current contemporary emphasis on social and political content) that it is the content. The experience of art is a transcendental sensual experience of human discovery. This best takes place in the presence of the work with all the subtleties of scale, color and touch, present as the artist intended, not digitized into a shadow of itself.

I do not think the mass marketing of electronic reproductions will “expand museum’s audiences� in a meaningful way. I am afraid it will encourage the all-too-common behavior already readily seen in museums. The “famous� paintings get a quick glance of recognition before the visitor makes his way to the museum store for his reproduction fix. Only now he has more choices: a poster, a lousy video, a Van Gogh coffee cup or an art disc.

The only “appreciation� I can see is in the callous use of art for someone’s profits to appreciate. Sounds like America.

HEDY BUZAN, Laguna Beach

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Before Bill Gates and his art museum leeches digitize and compress our very imaginations, there’s a few technical and creative issues we should consider before buying one of their nobly produced fine art CD-ROMs.

As a multimedia professional waist-high in interactive entertainment (and loving it, really), allow me to clarify some of the claims they’re feeding future consumers:

* Unless scanned images are high-resolution (more than 72 pixels per inch and in millions of colors), enlarged details will look jagged, similar to a faxed document. So much for nuance.

* The vast majority of computers cannot display more than 256 colors at a time. Even if the images are provided hi-res, only a fraction of existing computers will have the system and video memory to properly display them.

* No monitor displays colors perfectly, most not even close. Monitors can be calibrated, but the service or tool is expensive and the effect is temporary.

* Pirating will be a breeze. Unless the screen displays a giant X over the image, a pirate merely has to perform a screen “capture� to illegally copy an image. Any Macintosh or Windows system can already do this with a simple keystroke, no hacking required.

Ultimately, not even my professional $10,000 computer system would do justice to these fine works. A typical $1,500 consumer model would fare much worse.

But from a creative--dare I suggest spiritual--perspective, let me just point out your same-day Page 1 story on the rebirth of good old-fashioned, pen-in-hand letter writing. This growing rejection of word processing should be a red flag to CD-ROM publishers who think consumers will embrace every new gimmick that sucks them closer to their computer.

At the risk of pulling out the rug from under my feet, I’m looking forward to a 6.8 interactivity shakedown.

MARK BANKINS, West Los Angeles