Fancy a Mona Lisa or other masterpiece on your living room wall?

[Snoopy]

http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/quirkies/category/mona-lisa/

The Chinese are churning out several million "imitations" a year and they are coming to a dealer near you.

[Nick]

Won't she have slanty eyes though?

[Snoopy]

Apparently they can produce 5000 copies of painting a day to order. Original art they are not so good at and any expert can tell the difference between what they reproduce and the originals but their copies are indeed said to be good and faithful to the originals at first glance.

[Nick]

See also

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ways-Seeing-Based-BBC-Television/dp/0140135154/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201864692&sr=1-1

[Snoopy]

I have to say that the connection is not immediately obvious to me.

[Nick]

He talks/writes about the way in which we view reproductions of iconic pictures.......................

[Snoopy]

They are talking about this on Radio Four at the moment. Taking themselves very seriously too. One is English who keeps referring to Van Goff and another is a Yank who has just spoken of a "Container load of Van GO" waiting to be shipped.
Spilled my tea at the thought of a Chinese Van Go .... what a name for a Takeaway.

[Snoopy]

He talks/writes about the way in which we view reproductions of iconic pictures.......................

Thank you ..... I didn't want to have to buy the book to find out.

[Nick]

Excellent TV series too. Now lost to us.

http://pages.emerson.edu/Courses/Spring00/in123/WaysofSeeing.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berger

[Snoopy]

I am amused at the potential connection here:
http://www.berger-paint.co.uk/en/home/

[Nick]

I like John Berger. He has ploughed his own furrow relentlessly for years. Literally so actually

Berger's sociological writings include A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967) and A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975). His research for A Seventh Man led to an interest in the world which migrant workers had left behind: isolated rural communities. It was his work on this theme that led him to settle in Quincy, a small village in the Haute-Savoie, where he has lived and farmed since the mid-1970s. Berger and photographer Jean Mohr, his frequent collaborator, seek to document and to understand intimately the lived experiences of their peasant subjects. Their subsequent book Another Way of Telling discusses and illustrates their documentary technique and treats the theory of photography both through Berger's essays and Mohr's photographs.

I met him once. OK, he was a shit, but a shit with integrity!

[Snoopy]

I'll see if they have anything in the library and let you know what I make of him.

[Nick]

His prose is quite dense!!

[Snoopy]

So am I 

[Nick]

Bad combination then!

In this introductory chapter to Berger's popular book, he articulates a set of concerns with images, both photographic and painted or drawn, and with their relation to text. Berger opens by claiming for the image a prior and more central place in the human sensorium: "It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it" (7). Thus, from the beginning, words are a reduction of the image, an attempt to capture through language the essence of something that will inevitably elude that attempt. The visual also acts in a particular way to situate the viewer, both through the perspective of the image in question and through the cultural and historical context of that image. In the act of viewing, we situate ourselves in the image we view, thus taking on a special, perspectival relationship to the things viewed. "Perspective [which is not a natural but a cultural phenomenon] makes the single eye the centre of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity" (16). Following Walter Benjamin's argument in "The Art Object in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Berger argues that the technologies of photography and motion photography work to divest the image of its prior claim to a perspectival centrality: "What you saw was relative to your position in time and space. It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging on the human eye as on the vanishing point of infinity" (18). Thus, the meaning or signification of a photographic image as compared to a prior painted image, is decentered, diffuse. It carries less absolute meaning or, as Berger says, "its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings" (19). As an example, Berger discusses a painting which is shown on the television screen and which is thus simultaneously present inside the houses of potentially millions of viewing subjects. Though he doesn't push it this far, it seems that a similar argument might be helpful in ascertaining the effects of the endlessly reproducible digital image which can be accessed at will.

This chapter is interesting, though it meanders a bit. I found the most helpful revelation on the page change from 27 to 28. In an illustration of how words can impact on an image, Berger places a black-and-white reproduction of a Van Gogh at the bottom of page 27. It is recognizably Van Gogh and we could tell, even if there weren't text above it to confirm our assumption that it is "a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it" (27). Subsequent text tells us to "look at it for a moment. Then turn the page" (27). When we do so (after looking the requisite moment), we find the same picture at the top of page twenty-eight, accompanied by two "bits" of text. The first, which runs down the left-hand margin, tells us the painting's vital statistics--"WHEATFIELD WITH CROWS BY VAN GOGH 1853-1890"--but it is the other text, written in a clearly legible handwriting, that catches our attention. It reads, simply, "This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself" (28). The impact of these words on this picture was immediate and irrevocable. (Laurie Dickinson.)