1. The changing significance of the work of art in the museum
2. The museum, temple to the arts and sciences
5. Real and virtual visits
7. The memory of the classical ideal
5. Real and virtual visits
A visit to the virtual museum allows us in effect to carry out a series of instructive actions that exceed the limits of the mere photographic reproduction dear to Malraux. Viewing the computer screen one can walk down a gallery exhibiting artworks, close in on a particular one, zoom into the details and if necessary save that image and print a paper copy for personal use, and also obtain information on the work and the artist. In some cases one can participate as well in a guided virtual visit, eventually accompanied by voice and sounds.
It is worth stopping for a moment to consider some differences between a real visit and a virtual one. First of all, two different museums are concerned. In other words, photographic or digital reproductions are not original works but more or less successful replicas on different support systems. Leafing through an album of reproductions or visiting a web site are significantly different acts from walking through a museum. The difference is obvious from all points of view, but nevertheless needs emphasizing. Malraux never thought of his imaginary museum as a substitute for a real one, but as a particular extension of the latter, with specific functions of artistic appreciation and historical research. The same occurs with virtual museums. A new door, inexistent in the past, has been opened to access the museum. But the visitor is also a special visitor, a virtual one. It is a different visit. Even many of these visitors are not human, but programs in search of information. In future these agents or robots may report to their "owner" that there is a particular exhibit or art piece worthy of a visit. There are millions of people today who use this digital door to visit museums, they are a new breed of remote visitors.
The lesson is that we must take good care of this new public. Access must be made easier. In the same way that ramps help invalids to move around a real museum, something analogous will be needed in the virtual museum. Systems have now been developed to make web sites accessible to disabled users. It is advisable then that virtual museums take this need into account and eliminate barriers to virtual visiting, because we believe there is not sufficient awareness in this respect. In brief, we propose an act of solidarity by the art community: the accessible virtual museum.
We must also use this means to educate the occasional visitor. For example, "learning how to look at a picture" as is done by the Prado Museum, where every month a masterpiece is exhaustively analyzed on the internet. However, the subject of education exceeds the traditional museum program, guided visit or lecture. Today education has become one of the most important activities of a museum and takes multiple forms according to circumstance and place. The virtual museum has also opened up this educational niche with enormous success, helped by a great academic and research effort.
Finally, one of the most instructive comparisons is the relationship between the number of real visits and virtual ones per year. Some updated numbers may make us ponder.
Real visits Virtual visits National Gallery Washington
6,000,000
6,000,000
Louvre París
5,877,000
3,560,000
Metropolitan New York
5,000,000
2,600,000
MOMA New York
1,818,610
1,668,389
El Prado Madrid
1,760,226
880,000
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Figure 2
The number of virtual visits to museums is in general less than the real visits, except for the equal number of visitors to the Washington National Gallery of Art. Perhaps the trend in time will be for virtual visits to become more frequent and even outnumber real ones. If we were to measure, for example, the number of simple contacts (hits) per year and not distinguish between automatic site searchers and human users, figures make an impressive jump (7 million hits for the London National Gallery, for example, and up to 70 millions yearly for New York's Museum of Modern Art).
This new cultural phenomenon has become an important field of museum activity. For example, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) devote their time to specifically investigate, develop and report these new activities. The process seems irreversible but we cannot forget that there are still many real museums that do not have a site on the internet. Some are working on it with international help, as is the case of St. Petersburg's Hermitage with one of the most elaborate sites in the world operated by IBM. Others have been satisfied with no more than a brochure on the net but the world's most important museums pay particular attention to these virtual visits and earmark large amounts of money and creative resources to maintain interest in their site. This virtual dimension is absolutely new. Malraux could not imagine anything like it, but surely, had he known it, he would have been one of its most enthusiastic supporters.
There is a collateral but equally important subject relative to genuine funding for the museum via the digital network. In some sites virtual visitors can shop long distance in the museum shop via the internet. For example, the MOMA's select boutique which offers reproductions, books, catalogues, CDs, sculpture and jewels is available to the remote visitor who can have his purchases mailed to his home and charged to his credit card. The economic contribution of this can be significant; we must not forget that some museums such as the Bilbao Guggenheim get as much income from their shops as from the visiting public. Certainly, with increasing expansion of the virtual visitor market via the internet this activity will become an important contribution to the museum's upkeep.
In summary, the virtual museum has ceased to be a simple reflection of the real one; it has developed a life of its own, no longer satisfied with informing and exhibiting but challenging to action and discovery. Let us see some examples. A friend of mine was interested in the Tetragrammaton, the "magic square" symbol widely use in Renaissance iconography. I remembered having seen it on a 4 x 4 number table hanging on a wall in Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving of 1514, Melancholy. I knew that Washington's National Gallery of Art kept a very valuable collection of Dürer's engravings and I found there a sufficiently clear copy showing the columns, lines and diagonals of the magic square in the engraving. I was pleasantly surprised to find dozens of Dürer engravings on show in the virtual museum and among them the one I sought. I quickly obtained a beautiful image of the work and zoomed in to the details of the inscription. Deciphering was difficult because some symbols were incomprehensible to me. Then I proceeded to a slow decoding on the basis of the arithmetical properties of the square. I remembered that the sum of the columns, diagonals and lines always gave the same number. Little by little, adding the numbers I managed, not without work, to decipher and consistently reach the number 34, another magic number. I completed the table correctly and sent it to my friend via the internet. All of this was done without leaving my house, thousands of kilometers away from Washington. Incidentally, this research certainly took me less time as a remote visitor than it would have as a real visitor.
- Furthermore, in general, in a real museum not all its collections are on show and many will always remain inaccessible to the public due to their fragility. In the Chantilly Museum, where the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry is kept, there is a warning: "Your attention please! These works are so deteriorated that you can only see them on the internet!". Incidentally, here we see another very significant advantage of digital reproduction, when the original is inaccessible to the public because of its fragility and rarity.
- On the other hand, in the same way that educational activities exist in real museums, so are they present in virtual museums. It is evident, in this sense, that Malraux's dream has come true. One notable example is the QBIC (Query by Image Content) program of the Hermitage Museum which lets us experiment one of Malraux's most pleasant fancies, i.e., playing with visual associations to create style families. For example, the virtual visitor can select a color from a continuous spectrum and paint a variable band in a picture and entirely cover it in different colors. To try this out I chose only three, a certain blue, green and yellow shades in different proportions, that reminded me vaguely of the colors used by Matisse. To my surprised admiration there immediately appeared on the screen a series of paintings from the museum's collection, including two paintings by Matisse, Woman on the Terrace and View of Colliure which I never knew existed, besides other pictures by Derain, Signac, Manguin and Dupuis! In a way the QBIC program allowed me to recognize "the same palette" in this French style of the beginning of our century. The program also offers the possibility of selecting families of paintings by their forms.
- The possibility of interacting at a distance with works of art is something fantastic but we must remember that this is only the beginning. There is a long way to go before esthetic pleasure can equal gazing at the original artwork. For the time being these are visual experiments in miniature, but it is not too venturesome to think that in a short time, comfortably seated in our homes, we will be able to contemplate our favorite works of art in their real size with a clarity even greater than the original, without protective glass or barriers standing in the way of some detail of interest to us. A successful effort has been made by the Toshiba Electronic Museum where the visitor can appreciate hundreds of works of art on high-fidelity digital screens that are transmitted, upon request, through a network, from an image database. However, we must acknowledge that we are a long way from perfection, that the usual images on our personal computer are far from being really attractive and if projected in actual size clarity is blurred and on the PC screen scale is irremediably lost.