The work of art and the reproduction of its images. An open debate

The question of the relationship between the work of art and its image, understood as an instrument of communication, dissemination and knowledge, is a figure of great theoretical interest, a symptom that imposes itself on our attention in the present moment, that of confrontation with the phenomenon of the cultural and social image, with the image produced by the media universe that has transformed the society of the machine into a “society of the image.” A complex affair that confronts different latitudes in the fields of knowledge and culture: from history to philosophy, from art history to museology, from sociology to anthropology, from communication to marketing.

To try to unpack this question I would start with a work by Marcel Duchamp, L’HOOQ of 1919, in which the French artist redefines the theoretical and linguistic dimensions of the work of art and anticipates all questions about the relationship between the work of art and its image. Duchamp, in fact, takes possession of the image of one of the most universally known works and object of undying veneration by the public and equips it with a mustache and a goatee, making one of the most provocative and iconoclastic gestures in the history of art. An operation that was born at the very moment when the technical reproducibility of the image, with the birth of photography and cinema, was beginning its path, now more than a century long, toward the current dimension ofhyperconsumption of the image. Is Duchamp’s Mona Lisa, then, a metaphor for the commodification of the arts and the sanctification of image reproduction? Or is it simply a mockery of an increasingly anesthetized public that passively and selectively venerates works on the basis of their fame? In reality, it is both. What has been happening since Duchamp’s gesture - suffice it to mention that besides the Frenchman so many artists have worked on the image of the gioconda or on images of other works of the past, even before him - is a radical change in our system of communication not only in the media but also in culture. This direction of art has, in fact, initiated a process of liberalization of images of works of art that certainly opens up possible perspectives on the current discussions that are taking place globally on the policies to be adopted on the reproduction of cultural heritage.

As a museum director, I cannot help but think that the protection of works and their image is the first step from which to define the programmatic principles of the educational and social action of museums, proposing the museum as a weapon of active culture. But how to protect works and their images? There are currently two directions taking shape: that of a more radical protection involving a fee to use the images of cultural property, and that of absolute liberalization, as has happened in many American museums. It is perhaps in this challenge between these two positions that a delicate and complex endgame is being played out. On the one hand is the idea that, in today’s society of widespread image and thehyper-aesthetization of the world, cultural heritage should be protected and thus protected from these circuits, and on the other is the idea of riding a trail of image consumption to enter the system by participating in theorgy of widespread image. Perhaps the solution, as is often the case, lies in the coexistence of these two positions: we cannot allow the images of our cultural heritage to be devoured, shaped, mutated and often mortified by a system that indifferently engulfs and rejects everything-not everyone who posts images is Duchamp-but neither can we risk depriving the knowledge of our heritage through what are the channels of the current generations (web, social, etc.).

The affair between the work of art and its image seems to become more and more of a cultural oxymoron, which risks on the one hand harming the knowledge of our heritage on the other hand to make even those images that have cultural value enter into an absolute disneyfication of images, with the risks of a homogenization between trivial and standardized images and images that are meant to promote and develop our cultural processes. Today, in fact, the continuous proliferation of standardized images from media bombardment has created in man a condition of mental anorexia, of “instant memory ”marked by an “immediate connection” (Jean Baudrillard). An obligatory “momentary memory” that is the result of the streams of representation that constantly invade us, procuring a visual instability made of unconsciousness in recognizing the cultural, political and social value of the image, shifting attention to its “cultic” value.

The risk is, then, that in this tussle between freedom and restrictions we lose sight of the only important thing, the fact that our cultural goods and their images can become an immense archive of knowledge. On the other hand, Michel Foucault, in his famous essay The Archaeology of Knowledge, defines the archive as a theoretical space in which documents, and consequently also the images of cultural heritage, can acquire a new meaning and become monuments. An archive, however, that must be able to educate about images and not just place them on the word wide web or the pages of a magazine. But monuments live if there is a collective critical consciousness capable of dialogue and confrontation with them. For this reason, in my opinion, our institutions, the museum, the school, all spaces dedicated to culture and knowledge, must act as educational structures capable of generating knowledge and creating a critical consciousness about the use of images of our cultural heritage with critical awareness.

More than an answer to questions about this complex debate between rights and laws, between openness and closure, mine is meant to be an exhortation to think about the meaning of art and the dissemination and promotion of its images. Art, Paul Klee taught us in his Theory of Form and Figuration, "doesnot repeat visible things, but makes visible." It is precisely this openness to the visible that is the principle on which to base critical reflections around art and its reproductions today, the locus of inquiry that, in opposition to the concept of “modern iconoclasm” expressed by Baudrillard, allows one to launch beyond the image, to study, deconstruct and reconstruct it in a dimension of knowledge, to see, or rather to “know the image,” Wisse das Bild said Rainer Maria Rilke in the Sonnets to Orpheus.

This contribution was originally published in No. 20 of our print magazine Finestre Sull’Arte on paper. Click here to subscribe.

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