Mona Lisa stares at me, austere, for maybe five seconds before the crowd jostles me away. I reach up, lightning quick, snap a blurry photo to upload to Facebook to prove that I am a Person, then hightail it out of the largest art museum in the world. I’ve spared Ms. Lisa a glance and given Winged Victory a one-armed salute; it’s time for lunch.
Our cultural obsession with Art – not all art, just some – is almost entirely disingenuous. Art isn’t meant to just be stared at for a moment before moving on to the next thing. It’s meant to be interacted with.
I want to touch everything that I see. I need to know how all of the t-shirts on the rack feel in the store, I have to pull my fingers through the flour in the bag for a few moments before I portion it into the mixing bowl, liken it to what I assume an angel’s wings or tears or shirts or piss feel like. I want to touch the Mona Lisa. I want to put my hand on Nike’s robes to see if they’d ripple in the wind.
Last month the Philadelphia Museum of Art held yoga classes inside their ancient Middle East exhibit. I walked past a man with an 8-pack doing a shoulder stand next to a giant stone column.
Recently everyone on my Facebook feed has been posting pictures of their ‘art twins.’ Google’s Arts and Culture app boasts many features that allow you to interact with art, and that’s a good thing. It lets you take a picture of your face and a few seconds later, it shows you five different paintings of people whose faces look like yours.
That isn’t the only feature of the app – for instance, it also allows you to take virtual tours of museums and paintings. I clicked on a virtual reality tour of The Birth of Venus, a painting which I’ve always admired in a distant way because it has pretty colors. This painting is housed in the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, which is a city I have actually been to, but where I couldn’t bear to shell out the money to see anything more than the famous David statue (which, to its credit, was surprisingly incredible). An accented voice very suddenly says “In the 1470s the poet Angelo Poliziano evokes the arrival of Venus in Cyprus.” I’m looking at the painting on the screen, and a man is telling me about it. He sounds like one of the better museum tour guides, one who makes you forget that your feet hurt, you’re hungry and thirsty, and it’s a hundred degrees in the gallery.
It isn’t long, just a few moments of narration, but the voice weaves a story through what used to only be colors and people for me. The language is as pretty as the picture, and I can feel Walter Benjamin peering over my shoulder because yes, this is most certainly mechanical reproduction of art. And where is Venus’s aura now?
I am not in Florence. I haven’t just walked off a cobblestoned street. I won’t be sleeping in a small and uncomfortable hotel bed tonight. But I’m in the Uffizi nonetheless – or maybe the Uffizi is in my living room, and I realize that I’ve left the fan on in the bathroom. I pause the narration to turn it off.
So the jostling here isn’t people in a museum, it’s the imposition of real life and car noises and bathroom fans and roommates and Facebook notifications.
The real reason most people have downloaded the app in the past few days, and the reason I’ve downloaded it myself, is to use the aforementioned facial comparison feature. I say this with bitterness because all of my results were paintings of ugly men with long noses and saggy faces.
(I let my hair down, I put it up. I took off my glasses, I tilted my chin. I made a face, I scrunched my nose. The app told me no, you are these men. These men are you. This is your legacy and this is what you look like.)
When I look in the mirror I don’t see my face, I see my life. I see the year I got glasses, fourth grade, when I had a series of health scares and my eyesight started to go because my eyes didn’t realize that we weren’t dying yet. I see the eighth grade, when I started jamming small clear circles into my eyes so I could look at things clearly and look pretty all at once. I see tenth grade when I remembered that I didn’t care about that, and went back to glasses.
When the Google Arts and Culture app looks at my face, it sees the long-ish, straight nose that I got from my father that sticks out from my face like a buttress for the bridge of my glasses. It’s good of me to give it a job. The app sees the shape of my face, which narrows at the chin, which juts out, which gives me more of a severe look than I need. Maybe it sees my hair – and epic poems could be written about the wars I’ve waged with my head.
The Google Arts and Culture app decides that I look like a series of stiff white men with sagging cheeks and pointy long noses and it doesn’t understand, just as I didn’t understand until now, that I wanted to be given a softness. I wanted to flip through photos of dainty women with rosy cheeks and light-colored eyes and parasols and corsets and spring days. Instead I was given photos that look like they walked off the dollar bills in my wallet.
I wanted to be Art.
