Probably not the forum for an art discussion, but I manage a group of Imaging Scientists (spend a LOT of time around cameras) at a tech. company and my wife is an artist and works at a world class art museum... so we've had this discussion many times before.
There are many ways to experience art, I’m not one to tell anyone their way is ‘wrong’ but the technique of visitors only viewing an artwork through a camera lens is very common and there’s a cost attached. It seems most prevalent among visitors who are on prepackaged tours (here in the US that most often means folks from Asia). These individuals have limited time to view the museum so they speed through the works, stopping long enough at each to snap a picture or three before moving on (similar to the authors experience above). I’m not sure if the time constraint drives the behavior or if it’s cultural, but the result is that the experience of the art pieces is consumed once the individual has returned home not while actually in the museum.
My wife and I agree that while this technique does give the viewer a permanent record of the artwork… it is a second hand account, the individual MISSED the opportunity of a firsthand experience due to their choice to spend their limited time using a camera instead of interacting with the art. I’ve done this myself on a trip to Shanghai (Shanghai Museum – HIGHLY recommended) until a guard warned me that cameras weren’t allowed… at which point I switched to experiencing the art instead of just capturing it. The result is that I have lots of pictures of one wing of the museum, but few memories of that wing. The pictures are nice, and give me something to show and talk about with folks… but what we talk about is actually the parts of the museum where I wasn’t using a camera!
Putting down the camera and experiencing the art first hand allows a much deeper engagement with the various pieces than a static image can provide. Art doesn’t need to be moving to be dynamic, sculpture needs to be viewed from many angles, even paintings on a wall only really come alive when you can view from multiple distances and see how your frame of reference changes what you get out of it. I’m not talking about the (silly to a scientist) art snob discussion of subjective impressions like they are objective truth, but rather the emotional response to a work (that you don’t need an art degree to have) and how that response shifts as you move around it.
Now we have the advent of VR and AR… two very different topics. VR at some point in the future could provide you with the same opportunity to interact with a piece that you have in person. It will need more resolution than current systems and also huge data requirements. Even a ‘2d’ painting would need to be captured in 3d and at very high resolutions to allow viewers to experience things like the artist’s stroke technique… something that adds a lot of ‘depth’ to paintings, resulting in data sets in the tens to hundreds of gigabytes of data per piece. Some will still argue that the ‘museum experience’ is missing, but IMO that’s getting a bit hair splitting… and the value of this to people with limited mobility could be huge.
AR seems like a ‘low hanging fruit’ to me, rent a hololens and get access to interactive content for each piece as you travel through the museum. Maybe it’s the artist pointing out different features of the work or historians talking about the impact of the last restoration (and overlaying ‘before’ imagery!). For someone like me who gets into the history of a piece as much as ‘the moment’, I view this sort of capability as a fantastic enriching of the museum experience. My wife on the other hand thinks it’s just another distraction… she’s the person you see sitting on the bench for an hour looking at the painting with frustrated glances at the tourists standing in front of her snapping pictures (or God forbid… SELFIES). Her ideal museum experience would be sneaking in after closing, with no noise, technology, or other distractions. Which one of these experiences are ‘right’… I’d say both and neither, in an ideal world we’d all get enough time for both approaches, but if you have to choose one then choose the one that works for you. AR is already available at many museums… though it tends to be in the form of audio or internet ‘self guided tours’, simple but still capable of delivering more context than you’d otherwise get. If distractions aren’t for you… plan your trip off-season and go on a weekday – then shut off your phone and get as luddite as needed to meet your requirements for disconnection. There’s no right answer, but as someone in the field I look forward to technology offering more OPTIONS when it comes to consuming Art onsite as well as opening it up to people who would never otherwise have the opportunity to view it.
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