Mona Lisa

Let's consider this painting by Leo, the Mona Lisa. The exact details of its origin seem to be lost, or at any rate irretrievably muddled. Still, within a decade or two of its painting it came in to the ownership the French Monarch and remained there until the French Revolution. After that point it moved to the Louvre, with a side trip to Napoleaon's bedroom for a bit, and it's been in the Louvre ever since except for when it was stolen.

The point here is that this thing has been rattling around for 500 years, more or less.

The social milieu in which the painting has resided has changed several times, even if we lump "French Kings" all together, which we probably shouldn't.

For 500 years, various and sundry cultures have looked at the painting and found in it enough worth to not throw it out. What some king saw in it in 1712 I have no idea, but I dare say whatever he saw was not in any meaningful way what I see in the painting. Probably it doesn't much resemble what Leo saw in it 200 years earlier, or what whoever commissioned it saw (if indeed anyone commissioned it.)

The thing has legs. (haw haw haw)

I don't pretend to know why this painting has managed to avoid being thrown out. It probably does not hurt that it's a picture of a person but that is certainly not the whole thing.

Consider now contemporary art.

Somewhere in the MOMA's storage facilities are things like a pile of bricks, with a sheet of paper describing how to stack them up. They paid $800,000 for this at some point. (I am making this specific thing up, but the shape of the thing is true even if the details are made up.) In its day it was, genuinely, a powerful statement of something or other by a renowned artist. The social milieu in which it was made accepted it, created it, as that thing.

Will the social milieu, the culture, of 2120, find some new value in this, find some new way to view this crated pile of bricks as valuable enough to not throw away? I don't know, but I hazard a guess that the answer is probably not. While this pile of bricks might survive the inevitable culling, many similar objects will not. Some attempt will be made to sell them, and then into the dumpster they go.

This is not an indictment of the pile of bricks. In the first place, we're stipulating that it was a Good and Important piece in its day. In the second place, the process of culling and reducing collections is inevitable. If the MOMA still exists in 2120 it will have gotten rid of a great deal of 20th and 21st century art, to make room for newer work. That art has to go somewhere, and some it will find its way into dumpsters. sic transit gloria mundi and all that.

For all art, the passage of time is a gauntlet, and all will eventually fall to the headsman. Some few pieces get more time than most. It may surprise some of you to learn that libraries discard books at a fairly brisk pace, which is why libraries do not normally explode.

Which brings us around to photography.

It may well be my snobbish sneerning nature, but I cannot shake the notion that virtually everything from about 1970 to 2020 will end up in the dustbin before 2120. Good stuff, bad stuff, whatever. Not much of it makes any sense outside of its social milieu.

Even Sally Mann (sniffle). Those Blackwater tintypes will never survive being broken out of the collection. They make exactly zero sense outside the context of the rest of Mann's oeuvre. I mean, it's not a sure thing, art lovers are weird and idiocyncratic. Maybe 100 years from now there will be some completely new read on them that continues to declare then Great Art, just as the Mona Lisa is continuously re-imagined, re-read, and maintained in the pantheon. I am not particularly hopeful about the Blackwater series, though.

Things like pretty much everything in the MACK Books catalog will, I predict, be gone inside of a decade, maybe two. The bubble of collective hallucination which sustains all art is, in this case, very small, and to my eye very tenuous.

A commenter asked me what I thought of Brad Feuerhelm's Dein Kampf and I answered somewhat glibly. Later, I watched a video leafthrough, which you may also endure here: Dein Kampf. To be fair, it's not nearly as awful as I glibly suggested. There are hints of sequence, there are references back and forth between pictures. There's citation of Pictorialism, which always warms me up to your project.

But it's still very thin. There's no pacing, no modulation, it's just a single note of "I Hate Berlin" which is a pretty overdone and not very interesting genre. Especially since, as far as I can tell, everyone loves Berlin.

Is it going to wear well? Well, like the Blackwater tintypes, I'm not seeing it. Unlike the Blackwater tintypes, it has no particular context that gives it life. To my eye, it's just out there blundering around in the dark with all the other books of German Cement marinating in self loathing to no particular purpose. Will some social milieu 50 years hence somehow latch on to it and raise it to iconic status? It's possible, but I don't see how.

I consider it possible that in 100 years Art Historians will look back on this time as the last gasp of photography. These were the decades when photography split its time between inferior copies of the early 20th century, and meaningless noise. These were the decades when photography discovered, to its surprise, that there wasn't anything there, and by around 2030 the world was, to everyone's relief, pretty much giving up on photography as a serious thing.

This isn't a viewpoint I find appealing, because I think there is a lot of juice left in the old girl. It's just that nobody's doing it, the Serious Names are all engaged in this pointless self-loathing exercise, and the amateurs are all trying to be Ansel Adams or Alec Soth, or just stuck taking pictures of bugs and milk splashes.

(present company excepted, naturally! But we are not collectively much of a movement, are we?)

I would hate to see photography lose its way not because there is nowhere to go, but because idiots keep spilling their drinks on the map.