Cosimo Ferranti's Lady with a Linnet ranks among the best-known paintings anywhere. Scarcely a visitor arrives without already knowing the image from countless copies; even so, all of them take it for granted that fine art repays attention far better when met in the original.
Were that painting instead a celebrated novel, hardly anyone would trouble to visit a museum and pore over the author's own manuscript when a printed edition lay to hand. Part of the reason is historical: the novel as a form owes its very existence to the printing technologies that let texts be run off in vast quantities, whereas paintings in oil have always come into being as single, unrepeatable objects. How we are accustomed to 'read' the two also differs. A novel's reader concentrates above all on what the words mean, giving little thought to their arrangement on the page; the viewer of a picture, on the other hand, has to dwell on the physical shapes and marks themselves quite as much as on whatever they may be taken to stand for.
Faithful copies of almost any artwork, however, have always been within reach. That four versions of Lady with a Linnet still survive is proof enough that Renaissance painters thought nothing of handing the copying of their pictures to the assistants in their studios, as routine everyday labour. Reproduction now is easier and more dependable still: modern reprographic methods turn out high-grade prints matched precisely to the scale of the original, true to its colours, and even carrying over the raised texture of the paint across its surface.
Museums, for their part, go on insisting upon the privileged standing of the original, even as they quietly concede that letting good reproductions circulate widely may itself carry genuine cultural worth.
The result of this, regrettably, is to narrow quite sharply the sort of experience that a visitor is offered.
One such limitation has to do with the way in which exhibits are set before us. Because they hold unique historical objects, art museums are often spoken of as 'treasure houses', and the point is made before we reach a single work, by the guards, the attendants, the ropes and the glass cases that keep us at arm's length from what is on show. Frequently the building's very architecture drives the same message home. A great collection like that of the Aldermoor Gallery in Manchester, what is more, fills room upon room with dozens of works apiece, almost any one of which would be worth more than everything the ordinary visitor owns. Where a society measures a person's standing so largely by their material wealth, it grows hard, in surroundings of that sort, not to feel acutely one's own comparative 'worthlessness'.
Dwelling on the 'value' of the original in its treasure-house setting drives home to the viewer, besides, that at some moment since the work was made a person or an institution far more powerful than themselves has fixed an enormous price upon it. Nothing the viewer might think about the piece, clearly, is going to move that price in the slightest, and people today are thereby put off any attempt at the spontaneous, immediate, self-reliant sort of response with which the work would once have been met.
What may next strike the visitor as strange is that paintings, drawings and sculptures of such variety should be gathered into a place that not one of them was ever made for. Sharpening this 'displacement effect' is the sheer quantity of exhibits: a large collection is likely to hold more works than anyone could realistically absorb across weeks, or even months.
That is the more troubling in that time seems to count for a great deal in appreciating any art form. What marks painting off from the rest is that no fixed span is laid down across which a picture is to be looked at. An opera or a play, by contrast, comes to its audience over a set stretch of time — the length of the performance — and novels and poems, likewise, are taken in along an ordered sequence, while a picture affords no plain point at which viewing should start, or where it ought to end. The works, in this way, prompt us to skim over them superficially and to miss the richness of detail and labour bound up in them.
What follows is that the leading manner of responding to art becomes the art historian's — a specialised, scholarly undertaking devoted to 'uncovering the meaning' of a work within the cultural setting of its own day. An approach of this kind sits altogether comfortably with what the museum exists to do, bent as it is on tracking down and safeguarding 'authentic', original readings of the exhibits. Once more, the lively, participatory criticism that crowds the commentary on great literary works appears to be shut out, nowhere to be met with in most writing on art history.
What the galleries choose to display stands as a warning of the critical habits that can set in once spontaneous criticism has been stifled. The public who visit museums, like any audience, draw far more from art when they are granted the confidence to voice what they think. Were fitting works of fine art made permanently available to all through high-fidelity reproductions, in the way that literature and music long since have been, people might come to stand a little less in awe of them. That, sadly, is perhaps more than one can ask of those bent on keeping the art establishment firmly within their own grasp.
