The Observation Deck
I’ve always enjoyed those seemingly small historical details that turn out to have huge ramifications for art. Take, for instance, the invention in 1841 of the paint tube, allowing the Impressionists to work al fresco much more easily. Or the introduction in 1967 of the Sony Portapak video camera: lightweight, portable and just perfect for capturing those long durational body art performances in the 1970s.
With that in mind, here is the start of an ongoing, occasional catalogue of details that might – albeit in a much less significant way than the paint tube or Portapak – be tugging and pulling at the shape of our own age. As these are all limited to things I’ve noticed in the course of working for an art magazine, they are observations that mainly concern the dissemination of information. They are listed in no particular order. Although I have not included anything quite so earth-shatteringly transformative as the Internet, a few inclusions have already been much discussed elsewhere. I won’t apologize for their inclusion; firstly because I think they have specific consequences for art, but secondly because part of the fun of reading lists like this is discovering that you’re not the only person to have thought something and that someone else has kindly said it for you to save the potential embarrassment of people sniggering at you for saying something stupid. A few of these will amount to nothing. However, it’s just possible that some of the epiphenomena noted below might have an impact that punches above the weight that their merely technical or administrative character might suggest.
1. jpegs versus slides
When I first started working for frieze, in 1999, all documentation of art works received from galleries or artists for reproduction in the magazine was either on 35mm slide, a larger transparency format such as 5×4inches, or photographic print. A professional reprographic house could scan a high-quality transparency to virtually any size you wanted for the magazine. Today, all images are supplied in a digital format, and it is rare over the course of a year to have even one slide to scan. Of course, the great advantage to this is that an image owned by someone in, say, Johannesburg, can be sent to London in an instant. Magazine production schedules have become far more nimble, and much less dependent on postal services and couriers. The flipside, however, is that digital images can’t be blown up beyond the size they were scanned or taken at in the first place. In order for a digital image to be able to print properly, it must have a minimum resolution of 300 dots-per-inch. If an image file, at 300 dpi, is only 5×3cm then that’s the maximum size it has to be printed. If, however, it’s 50×30cm, then a magazine designer has more options available to them as to what size it appears on a page.
You might think this is all irrelevant geek-speak, yet the file size of a digital image directly affects how it is reproduced. A tiny, pixellated image can’t be magically made into a beautifully crisp and detailed poster-size reproduction, no matter how hard you push it in Photoshop. This has potential consequences for the pictorial emphasis of an article. In a given article, artist A’s work might, to the casual observer, appear less important than artist B’s work, because artist B sent the magazine a huge jpeg image that could be reproduced large but artist A just sent a matchbox-size screen-grab. As editors, we try very hard not to allow things to get skewed unnecessarily, but nonetheless we have found that questions of editorial design choice have changed.
2. Desktop publishing and the affordability of colour printing
Every day the frieze editorial team receives through the post, along with all the usual press releases, between five and ten highly produced books and catalogues. (That’s not to mention all the emails announcing even more books in the pipeline…) This number has increased from maybe just two or three per week ten years ago. Just look at how many full-colour art magazines and exhibition catalogues there are today: there has been an explosion in print material concomitant with the exponential expansion of the art world, but also in tandem with the increased availability and cheapness of DTP software and quality colour printing. For all the talk of criticism not being so important anymore, there’s a hell of a lot more print-matter out there. Everyone wants a catalogue and accompanying essay. Everyone wants a piece of posterity.
3. The limits of the page versus the infinite space of the blog versus ‘back-story’ art
A writer, when commissioned to produce an article for a print magazine, is given a word count, which is a guide to how long the piece should be, and their text must come within close range of this figure. One of the noted characteristics of post-Conceptual and ‘relational’ art has been work that requires the viewer to understand a complex and often lengthy back-story in order to be able to decode it, or assimilate large amounts of research material provided by the artist. A reviewer writing about such a work for a magazine must make some attempt to convey this ‘back-story’ in their text, partly because it cannot be assumed that every reader will have seen the work, but mainly in order to be able to construct a coherent and solid written argument about the piece. If they have 500 words within which to write, but the artwork requires lengthy description, then they can either detail it accurately in, say, 300 words, but sacrifice space for critical assessment in only 200 words. Alternatively, they can give themselves more room to argue a point – say, 450 words – but at the expense of giving a cursory and potentially inadequate recapitulation of the ideas in only 50 words. It goes without saying that an online piece of writing seldom has to deal with this kind of problem.
4. The anonymity of blogs
If I say something negative about an artist’s work in print, my name is always at the bottom of the article. It’s an old-fashioned convention that encourages a little circumspection about what you write. Log in as ‘artskeptik’ or ‘mud_slinger82’, however, and you can say whatever you like, with as much vitriol as you care to spew, and no one can call into question the integrity of your opinion by actually being able to know something about your background or position. (Or even just shout at you in the street.) Public debate about art has become, bizarrely, more diverse, inclusive and frank but simultaneously more dislocated, alienated and unproductive. Which brings me to…
5. …Punditry
Speaking only about the British mainstream press here, the expansion of contemporary art into the public consciousness that has occurred in the UK over the past 20 years has also resulted in the curious phenomenon of the non-expert art critic. Commentators with scarcely more than a basic working knowledge of contemporary art frequently opine in newspapers about high profile artists or are asked to sit on judging panels for prestigious awards such as the Turner Prize. In principle I have no problem with this, but I somehow cannot imagine Adrian Searle or Jennifer Higgie being asked to remark upon the Test Match or referee the FA Cup Final. Because contemporary art is viewed with some degree of suspicion, is it thus considered ‘fair game’?
6. A blindingly obvious one here: YouTube, googlevideo and ubu.com
Someone in the pub tells you about Andy Warhol starring in an advertisement on Japanese TV in the 1980s and in just a few seconds of getting back in front of your computer you can watch it. The easy availability of obscure music online – albums, for instance, that would once have taken half a lifetime (or half a life’s savings) to track down but are now easily found on blogs and fan sites – is massively transforming the development of new music being made today. There is now a huge amount of art-related content on YouTube, and specialist sites such as ubu.com. At a recent event at London’s Cubitt Gallery, I heard Tate curator Stuart Comer discuss the potential impact of ‘web 2.0’ sites like these on the work of moving image curators such as himself, which got me thinking about the domino effect that has on writing criticism and online publishing. Are all those music and art blogs packed full of mp3s of rare albums and film clips – absorbing though they can be – just a grown-up game of show-and-tell?
To be continued …
I’ve always enjoyed those seemingly small historical details that turn out to have huge ramifications for art. Take, for instance, the invention in 1841 of the paint tube, allowing the Impressionists to work al fresco much more easily. Or the introduction in 1967 of the Sony Portapak video camera: lightweight, portable and just perfect for capturing those long durational body art performances in the 1970s.
With that in mind, here is the start of an ongoing, occasional catalogue of details that might – albeit in a much less significant way than the paint tube or Portapak – be tugging and pulling at the shape of our own age. As these are all limited to things I’ve noticed in the course of working for an art magazine, they are observations that mainly concern the dissemination of information. They are listed in no particular order. Although I have not included anything quite so earth-shatteringly transformative as the Internet, a few inclusions have already been much discussed elsewhere. I won’t apologize for their inclusion; firstly because I think they have specific consequences for art, but secondly because part of the fun of reading lists like this is discovering that you’re not the only person to have thought something and that someone else has kindly said it for you to save the potential embarrassment of people sniggering at you for saying something stupid. A few of these will amount to nothing. However, it’s just possible that some of the epiphenomena noted below might have an impact that punches above the weight that their merely technical or administrative character might suggest.
1. jpegs versus slides
When I first started working for frieze, in 1999, all documentation of art works received from galleries or artists for reproduction in the magazine was either on 35mm slide, a larger transparency format such as 5×4inches, or photographic print. A professional reprographic house could scan a high-quality transparency to virtually any size you wanted for the magazine. Today, all images are supplied in a digital format, and it is rare over the course of a year to have even one slide to scan. Of course, the great advantage to this is that an image owned by someone in, say, Johannesburg, can be sent to London in an instant. Magazine production schedules have become far more nimble, and much less dependent on postal services and couriers. The flipside, however, is that digital images can’t be blown up beyond the size they were scanned or taken at in the first place. In order for a digital image to be able to print properly, it must have a minimum resolution of 300 dots-per-inch. If an image file, at 300 dpi, is only 5×3cm then that’s the maximum size it has to be printed. If, however, it’s 50×30cm, then a magazine designer has more options available to them as to what size it appears on a page.
You might think this is all irrelevant geek-speak, yet the file size of a digital image directly affects how it is reproduced. A tiny, pixellated image can’t be magically made into a beautifully crisp and detailed poster-size reproduction, no matter how hard you push it in Photoshop. This has potential consequences for the pictorial emphasis of an article. In a given article, artist A’s work might, to the casual observer, appear less important than artist B’s work, because artist B sent the magazine a huge jpeg image that could be reproduced large but artist A just sent a matchbox-size screen-grab. As editors, we try very hard not to allow things to get skewed unnecessarily, but nonetheless we have found that questions of editorial design choice have changed.
2. Desktop publishing and the affordability of colour printing
Every day the frieze editorial team receives through the post, along with all the usual press releases, between five and ten highly produced books and catalogues. (That’s not to mention all the emails announcing even more books in the pipeline…) This number has increased from maybe just two or three per week ten years ago. Just look at how many full-colour art magazines and exhibition catalogues there are today: there has been an explosion in print material concomitant with the exponential expansion of the art world, but also in tandem with the increased availability and cheapness of DTP software and quality colour printing. For all the talk of criticism not being so important anymore, there’s a hell of a lot more print-matter out there. Everyone wants a catalogue and accompanying essay. Everyone wants a piece of posterity.
3. The limits of the page versus the infinite space of the blog versus ‘back-story’ art
A writer, when commissioned to produce an article for a print magazine, is given a word count, which is a guide to how long the piece should be, and their text must come within close range of this figure. One of the noted characteristics of post-Conceptual and ‘relational’ art has been work that requires the viewer to understand a complex and often lengthy back-story in order to be able to decode it, or assimilate large amounts of research material provided by the artist. A reviewer writing about such a work for a magazine must make some attempt to convey this ‘back-story’ in their text, partly because it cannot be assumed that every reader will have seen the work, but mainly in order to be able to construct a coherent and solid written argument about the piece. If they have 500 words within which to write, but the artwork requires lengthy description, then they can either detail it accurately in, say, 300 words, but sacrifice space for critical assessment in only 200 words. Alternatively, they can give themselves more room to argue a point – say, 450 words – but at the expense of giving a cursory and potentially inadequate recapitulation of the ideas in only 50 words. It goes without saying that an online piece of writing seldom has to deal with this kind of problem.
4. The anonymity of blogs
If I say something negative about an artist’s work in print, my name is always at the bottom of the article. It’s an old-fashioned convention that encourages a little circumspection about what you write. Log in as ‘artskeptik’ or ‘mud_slinger82’, however, and you can say whatever you like, with as much vitriol as you care to spew, and no one can call into question the integrity of your opinion by actually being able to know something about your background or position. (Or even just shout at you in the street.) Public debate about art has become, bizarrely, more diverse, inclusive and frank but simultaneously more dislocated, alienated and unproductive. Which brings me to…
5. …Punditry
Speaking only about the British mainstream press here, the expansion of contemporary art into the public consciousness that has occurred in the UK over the past 20 years has also resulted in the curious phenomenon of the non-expert art critic. Commentators with scarcely more than a basic working knowledge of contemporary art frequently opine in newspapers about high profile artists or are asked to sit on judging panels for prestigious awards such as the Turner Prize. In principle I have no problem with this, but I somehow cannot imagine Adrian Searle or Jennifer Higgie being asked to remark upon the Test Match or referee the FA Cup Final. Because contemporary art is viewed with some degree of suspicion, is it thus considered ‘fair game’?
6. A blindingly obvious one here: YouTube, googlevideo and ubu.com
Someone in the pub tells you about Andy Warhol starring in an advertisement on Japanese TV in the 1980s and in just a few seconds of getting back in front of your computer you can watch it. The easy availability of obscure music online – albums, for instance, that would once have taken half a lifetime (or half a life’s savings) to track down but are now easily found on blogs and fan sites – is massively transforming the development of new music being made today. There is now a huge amount of art-related content on YouTube, and specialist sites such as ubu.com. At a recent event at London’s Cubitt Gallery, I heard Tate curator Stuart Comer discuss the potential impact of ‘web 2.0’ sites like these on the work of moving image curators such as himself, which got me thinking about the domino effect that has on writing criticism and online publishing. Are all those music and art blogs packed full of mp3s of rare albums and film clips – absorbing though they can be – just a grown-up game of show-and-tell?
To be continued …
