Vik Muniz Painstakingly Reconstructs the Backs of Famous Paintings | Hacker News Reader

Vik Muniz Painstakingly Reconstructs the Backs of Famous Paintings

hyperallergic.com

71 pointsprismatic16 comments

I was just at this exhibit a few hours ago, funny enough. This exhibit is the first contemporary art to ever be shown at the Mauritshuis in the Hague, which is a beautiful museum that has works by Rembrandt (including a great self-portrait), Vermeer (including Girl with a Pearl Earring) and many more old Dutch masters.

Here's a photo I took of my favorite work: https://www.instagram.com/p/BIgFNpXA53Q/

The exhibit is amazing and I highly recommend it. Vic Muniz is a very talented artist and I think the Mauritshuis picked a fantastic first exhibition.

From the article: "When Muniz had the opportunity to bring his recreated frame [of the Mona Lisa] to the Louvre and placed it side-by-side with the authentic painting, technicians who have spent years caring for the original apparently thought his was the genuine one."

In the hopes that it will help people looking for the verso of the Mona Lisa, TIL it's also called "La Gioconda". Also, people like throwing things at it.

ok, I accept it may be technically accomplished.

But is it interesting beyond that ?

It was, at least for me. One of my biggest complaints with a lot of art museums with no contemporary pieces is that people just walk through, not actually looking at the art, just to say "I saw a (Vermeer|Rembrandt|Bosch) today! In this exhibit, people were really interacting with the art. They were trying to look behind the pieces to tell if there was art there; some people just thought the room was unfinished and they shouldn't be there; some tried to tell if the pieces were the actual backs or not. Others were more astute and read the description on the wall, and almost everyone that did was still intrigued by the art. Think of it as a 3D photograph of the actual artwork, not only very interesting to look at but also exceedingly well-done. And, while even professionals that worked with the Mona Lisa for years could not tell the real Mona Lisa back from its replica, there were certainly fine nuances in the work that made it more than just a pure photocopied version of the "original". At the very least, there was nobody doing the very common walk-through-the-room-spending-10-seconds-on-each-piece that fills traditional galleries, and it made me very happy to see.

If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy an exhibit currently on display at the Met Breuer, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York called "Unfinished". It displays dozens of works of art that were never finished, for varying reasons. Some are classified as intentionally unfinished (would that make them finished?), but they are all fascinating to see and read about.

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/unfinishe...

> intentionally unfinished (would that make them finished?)

If memory serves, someone quipped "art works are not finished, merely abandoned".

(I'll abandon this and omit searching ;-)

It's a form of fetish.

You see it in programming cirlces too. Obfuscated C program contests, etc.

You're really into something and can't get enough of it. You explore it from any angle. You make up angles. You extrapolate.

So just what is it that the Art World is really into? It's not beauty, it's not the prestige of institutions, it's not really money. I think it's cleverness/chic and a kind of cult of the artist as someone with greater insight than the rest of us?

Art.

The Art World is really into Art.

Just like programmers are into programming.

That's not helpful, because since the 60s, art can be anything the artist claims as art.

I think the modern art period can be traced back to the 1920s, but anywho, there is also the component of reception. It's not just what the artists says, but if the Art World receives it as such.

Actually it turns out wikipedia traces modern art back to the 1860s.

To be more serious, it's not that the artist has more insight than the audience, but rather the arists initiates a dialogue with the audience intended to /raise questions/, possibly to arrive at new insights.

To quote Picasso, apropos of a technology discussion board: "Computers Are Useless. They Can Only Give You Answers."

Art poses questions.

Modern Art as we know it today is the freest field of human inquiry. There are no restrictions, really, on subject or medium. It's completely open. Of course, for that reason, it is the least secure in what it communicates.

All other human endeavors of understanding have internal restrictions, for good reason. Math, science, history, scholarship, they all have rules that defines what is and what is not valid, relevant information and understanding. With these restrictions, you get certainty and definitiveness.

The modern field of art, being free from such constraints, can address more topics in more varied ways, but in exchange for that freedom, it gives up certainty and focus. The question "What is Art?" cannot really be answered, and is actually irrelevant to the field itself.

I was hoping that it was going to be famous paintings from the reverse perspective. As if the painter had set up on the opposite side of the scene.

I thought it would be a recreation of how the paint looks like from the back of the canvas?

Tom Keating did this with a few of his forgeries -- took the location of a known painting and then mentally turned 90 or 180 degrees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyA8fkMJcDE

the current exhibitor (Mauritshuis in Den Haag) has produced a short "making of" video providing some more insights how the frames were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM5SVKsP-hg

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