The Easel

12th May 2020

The Pleasures of Home Viewing

Well, here’s a different voice! Lockdown has its compensations if you are not enamored of the art world’s “society of private views and dinners”. Making art available for home viewing is inherently “democratic”. Even if it is online, art can pack a punch – “art is robust enough to survive not only translation into a portable, reproducible and affordable medium but also the distraction of my flatmate boiling the kettle”.

Sylvain Bellenger on the online future of museums

An American running one of Italy’s largest museums expects the crisis will change museum attitudes to their online presence. The virtual is its “own dimension … not a substitute for reality’, partly because “our way of seeing changes with technology”. Digital photography, for example, reveals tiny details that signal “the intentions and desires of the painter. The worst mistake would be to think we can go back to normal.”