Caravaggio - documentary by Robert Hughes (1975) 6 of 7

Robert Hughes from a 1997 interview:

I think traditional media, painting, sculpture, drawing, you know, these media are always going to attract a certain sensibility, which realizes that it is only through them that certain kinds of meaning can be made real, only through them that certain kinds of meaning can be expressed. This doesn't mean that other kinds of meaning are invalid, or that they are undesirable, or anything like that. It is just that there are certain senses of reality and presence that pertain to traditional media and you are not going to get them out of pixels. Every time I lecture, there is always some Gatesian nerd out there in the audience who sticks up his hand and says, "Well, since we can perfectly reproduce an image on a high-fidelity television screen, why do you need to go and see the original?"

And the answer is because paintings are things in the physical world, made out of colored mud smeared on a piece of cloth or a piece of board, with a stick with hairs on the end. They have a particular address to your body, and none of this comes across in the computer image. Saying this is not the same as saying, we shouldn't write on word processors, the only thing is the quill pen.

There is nothing retrograde about saying this; you are recognizing that there are things that just don't translate into other mediums. But you see, they think this because they have been born in a world that is entirely made of weightless images.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Caravaggio
• documentary
• Robert-Hughes
• Art
• Renaissance
• Painting
• Pittura
• Italiana
• Italy
• History
• Museum
• Culture
• Documentary Film
• Artist