The above quote comes from Paola Antonelli, noted curator for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in article from the Atlantic by Megan Garber. The main focus is on a new MoMA experimental (mostly online) exhibit of hers, "Design and Violence," but if you read the article you can see that Antonelli makes a name for herself for conceptually stunning exhibits, like the one she did on video games a few years back.
The quote comes near the end of the piece, in which Antonelli discusses the participatory nature of museum interaction and experimentation. The digital age, she claims, is making us re-think the public's relationship to the museum, as it becomes increasingly more like a laboratory for artist and audience alike.
What Antonelli is getting at in her quote is that the age of the movie-theater-as-temple is over. We no longer sit passively in awe at the giants on the big screen, and the real key to the destruction is the ability of all of us to shoot movies and share them via the internet. It's not the streaming video revolution of Netflix, or the advent of the DVD. It's not the increased presents of home video (like the VHS in the early days, or the expansion of cable/satellite tv). It's not the very installation of the television into the family living room. Nor is it the collapse of the old Hollywood studio system, that forced the studios to sell their interests in theater chains, nor the rise to power of agencies who allowed their star-clients to call the shots instead of the movie producers. Nor the move to suburbia and away from the big cities, where the biggest movie temples lay in ruins for decades, with only a handful of legends survive.
If I may be a bit cheeky in turning back decades of history to chart the decline of the movie theater business, it's for an ultimate purpose. Antonelli's comment reminded me of the famous essay by Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Nearly a hundred years ago, Benjamin theorized that the relationship the public has toward art is fundamentally changed by the ability of art -- photograph and film in particular -- to be reproduced over and over again. There is no "original" to a photograph or film strip; the same content can be reproduced as long as you have paper or film stock to print, and thus an audience in one part of the world can see the same content as an audience in another part of it. The relation of Art in the pre-mechanical age to its audience once held a mystical, religious, magical quality. (Recall Antonelli's words about temples?) A work of art once held a kind of "aura." In the age of Mechanical Reproduction, such an aura does not exist. Art in museums are a "ritual function," according to Benjamin.
As Benjamin also notes, the status of "experts" has changed in this age. In the technique of the film, he writes, everyone who witnesses it becomes a kind of expert; the authority of cultural critics in the style of Matthew Arnold is no longer accepted as (so to speak) Gospel. (Benjamin mentions that sports is analogous to this, noting that every group of newspaper boys on bikes talks about races as if they were experts. Should that surprise us, who live in the era of SportstalkRadio?) The subjects of Art also once held aura, but now, says Benjamin, anyone can be filmed. And of course in our age, anyone can be a film-maker. Benjamin foresaw this when he wrote about the possibility of anyone becoming an author as print became even more cheap in his age. As he wrote of the distinction between how "the masses" respond to Art and to film, "The progressive reaction [to a Chaplin film, as opposed to a reactionary response to a Picasso] is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion
of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.
Benjamin's point about mechanical reproduction can also go back to Gutenberg, who really began the revolution that brought down the temples that the Church had built (leading to the Reformation, among other things). But more on that another time. I think that what has happened today, when I reflect on Antonelli's comment, is that as the digital revolution took place, cinema itself became elevated to status of Art, of something sacred, and movie theaters too gained some semblance of aura. (Great thinkers were arguing for film as an Art form going back almost to film's origins, but it's worth noting that the Supreme Court first decided that film was mainly a form of commerce in a famous decision in 1916, and that that decision was only overturned about forty years later, when film was given First Amendment protection.) I certainly have felt that sense of the sacred in movie theaters, especially when a transformative film was unfolding, like 2001, or Vertigo, or Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. This is what often happens: a new medium almost automatically uplifts the status of the medium it supplanted to sacred. The book -- not just THE Book -- was a sacred text, and when Gutenberg came along, there were fears that books written out on parchment would no longer matter, and lose their aura -- which they paradoxically gained once moveable type came along. Cinema did not have an aura, wrote Benjamin, but in the wake of so many revolutions since WWII, it has magically attained that aura.
That said: I'm looking forward to seeing Boyhood on the big screen tomorrow..
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