When VR meets art, something new is created
One oppressively hot October day in New York City, the writer Olivia Laing went to the Whitney to see Nighthawks, the famous painting of a diner by Edward Hopper. In her recent book The Lonely City, Laing talks about what it is like to see a very famous painting in real life for the first time.
She speaks of texture. "The bright triangle of the diner's ceiling was cracking," she writes. Not a crack in the ceiling. Not quite. A crack in the paint that has made the painted ceiling. "A long drip of yellow ran between the coffee urns," Laing continues. "The paint was applied very thinly, not quite covering the linen ground, so that the surface was breached by a profusion of barely visible white pinpricks and white linen threads."
This is how it often is when famous paintings are suddenly before us, I suspect. Reproduction makes the image itself famous, but proximity to the real thing gives us back the surface, the painting as an object. It turns us into curators, or maybe crime scene analysts: we look at the canvas and make out the damage, the near-invisible quirks, the interaction of physics and chemistry and time.
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