Temporary (and unfortunately permanent) closures of museums and public art spaces kind of have been the norm during the pandemic. I’ve considered myself lucky being in the DC Metro area, hitting up the free and private galleries on the weekends. But that is no longer an option for me and my wife. Salvador Dali’s “The Sacrament of the Last Supper” and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ “Shaw Memorial” at the National Gallery are old friends we haven’t seen in some time.

Now sure, hop on the interwebs and we can see these pieces of art through image searches.  But it isn’t the same.  Why…  Well the image of the painting is a digital rendering and not really what the work looks like.  This could be because of filters, poor light quality, poor resolution, artificially enhanced resolution, crap computer… you get the point.  The image you are looking at is not really the painting (or piece of art). 

So how do we see our old friend Shaw.  A booze fueled late web search of the memorial yields images that are not real, the shit ton of drinks further distorts that reality, and memory is faulty.  As time passes, how I remember that work is different from its true form but we do “know” that the jpeg we found online is different from what we saw in person.

Ok.. as a thought experiment, we could break into the National Gallery and say hello in person to our friend. However, since it can be argued that we don’t actually perceive true reality and only understand it through personal filters (and icons- look up Donald Hoffman for mind blowing discussion on reality), once we perform our Nick Cage-like B&E and are stood in front of Shaw… well neither of us are seeing the reality of the work. We are biased by evolution and our own perceptions, limitations (I see poorly in the dark), and biases (I remember it was smaller).

But when it is time to leave the gallery, we run across Byron Kim’s “Synedoche”.  To this point the discussion has been on reality of a piece of art we “knew existed”, now stands Kim, an artist we had zero knowledge of. In our reality here is a piece of art that existed in sort of a quantum world. Existing and not existing until it was observed. And the nature of that observation while defining the work in space and time as real to us is neither real to us nor is the nature of the actual work.  Regardless, Kim’s work is pretty damn cool.

Crap. Ok… then going back to the interwebs, and if we only knew Kim’s work from a rando image search, is that jpeg of work just as real as the actual piece that we didn’t know existed in the National Gallery.

I don’t know what this means for the objective reality of a piece of art.. All I know is that the “philosopher” D. Rumsfeld once stated that there are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns… and I just want to get back into a gallery and experience some awesome unknown unknown paintings again!

– Bernhardt

@katupintxos