ADAM: Hey, hey. I know you.
GOD: Yeah. Yeah. Weren't you that...guy...
ADAM: Hey, yeah. Didn't we meet like at
GOD: I think it was...
ADAM: Hey. Yeah! That's right. That's where it was! Yeah. Hey, man, you look great.
so few would argue that light maintenance is inappropriate. But once it is visible, what about reviving the colors? Revisiting the details. Do we deny history her due? Or do we deny the audience of today what the audience of yesteryear enjoyed? How does one maintain this allusive thing called authenticity when time does not give a shit.
My friend put to me an interesting question that is similar. Kind of. Well, it's an art question. Sort of: it was actually an art metaphor to talk about theatre. I am defining what I think the role of the dramaturg is, and I am lucky to have found a friend who disagrees with me at the very core. Disagrees with me in a way that fills the air between us with a violent electrical current.
The question: Would you allow a curator of a museum to hang Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night upside down?
I started to think how cool it would be to have an exhibition in which numerous masterpieces were flipped upsides. How we would see the pieces in a new way. We would see elements of the paintings we never saw before. This was not my friend's intention. I started to think of the marketing side of it too: purists would be enraged by the prospect of disrespecting the art while a small faction of revolutionary post-modernists would gleefully praise the reinterpretation. Fireworks! Arguments! Heated arguments that can only happen between people who believe they have found the meaning of life. One side has found meaning in an authentic beauty that reaches deep down into them and phenomenologically moves them; the other side has found meaning in the endless potential of interpretation and in the evolution of meaning itself.
The ticket sales would boom!
And people would go see the art again. And one intention we can safely assume about every artist -- possibly the only intention we can safely assume -- is that they wanted the work seen.
But would this audience see the art the way that the artist had intended? This was my friend's point. Are they seeing the art or are they seeing the interpretation of the art? I think this was her point. When we view The Starry Night upside down, are we seeing Van Gogh's painting or the curator's project?
I would go see it, and I think a lot of people would. And I would enjoy it (and I think a lot of people would). I also think that a lot of people would also view the painting how it was originally angled: I would wager that many patrons of the exhibit would crook their necks uncomfortably downways; I would hypothesize that many of them would peruse the merchandise in the giftshop on the way out to remind themselves (but do you think they hung the posters upsidedown when they got home?); and with whole museums our our fingertips, I would guess that many a Google search of The Starry Night would occur before, after, and during (iphones, you scare me).
But what if this was it? What if this was the moment that you would see The Starry Night for the first and last time? What if no one was around to tell you that it was upside down? That it "wasn't supposed to be viewed this way." What if there was no context?
These final extrapolations from the original question are what irk me the most. I don't know. A temporary exhibit viewed in the context of a world of easily accessible information is easily excused. A permanent entry in the museum of the mind is less so.
Maybe this is the compromise: there are works of art -- as there are works of theatre -- that have reached a level of contextualization. And this context protects the piece from any one exhibition -- or production -- defining it. I would argue that The Starry Night is protected. I would argue that Death of a Salesman is protected. And since they are protected, why not screw with a little bit...so as not to get bored with them?
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