Quoted By:
When you enter the Art Gallery, it appears completely deserted. You walk around the vacant white galleries, surrounded by abstraction, colour fields and geometric emptiness. Most images are really embodiments of ways of seeing. Seeing comes before words. The world is explained with words, but ordinary words can never unmake the situation, the surroundings. The explanation of words never quite fits the sight itself, because what you see is based on what you believe. To see something, to look at it, is a choice. To touch something is to situate yourself in relation to it. You never just look at a thing. You look at the relation between the thing and yourself. When you see art from the past, you are situating yourself in relation to history. To see something is really to combine part of the world into you, to constitute the surroundings into who you are.
Seeing is changed by technology. A film unfolds in time, whereas all elements of a painting exist simultaneously. The camera changed the meaning of a painting, from interior architecture to something that could be infinitely reproduced. Once a thing can be reproduced, shared, transmitted endlessly forever, its uniqueness is destroyed, its meaning diminished. The meaning of the thing shatters and fragments. In the past, the only way you could see a thing was to physically go to it. These things became relics, unique and beautiful. The relics are like reverse lighthouses - instead of light radiating out, appearances travel in.
But if you can reproduce a thing endlessly, anyone can use it. The authority of the relic, of Art, is lost. Does a thing have to be unique, in order to be beautiful? Does a thing have to be real, in order to be beautiful?
Your echoing footsteps take you round the corner and you can sense a conversation ahead. A male voice is saying -
So I am thinking of finding a successor. Do you know anyone? Ideally it should be someone from a minority background, or a woman - I hear even military contractors and most of the large defense primes are run by women these days! It will help with the image of the charity. More donations to appeal from the upcoming generation, if they see the foundation being run by a woman. Of course I will stay involved, behind the scenes...
>(In receptionist disguise) Blurt out: me! Me! I can do it! I am a strong independent...
>Continue to listen to this conversation
>Draw a gun and immediately shoot the speaker in the face as you turn round the corner. The cavernous vacant halls of the exhibition space echo a bit, but there is no-one else around
>Something else...? (maybe you have an item?)
(If you know, you must write-in and explain how exactly you will use it)
