Punktum, aura, and all those wondrous wow moments!

Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des Rives du Bosphore
Drawing: Antoine Ignace Melling

Back to the question – when is a museum not a museum – concerns me quite a lot as someone who performs the museum online for a profession. I would like to state for the record that the 'digital' museum – I actually hate that term but don’t really have anything better at hand - doesn’t even try to compete with the physicality of the museum object/artwork. So all you luddites who out there are this very moment ranting about the preciousness of the physical object are missing the point altogether! I would like to propose here (in black and white) that the online museum actually may well act as a vehicle for those extracurricular moments that recall Barthes' punktum or, even manage to compensate – big time - for the irretrievable loss of the aura. Yes, those lost qualities of the artwork that Walter Benjamin so lamented in his seminal 1936 essay.

And if you think that mechanical reproduction caused such unforgiving loss, what about the relentless clone-ability of the electronic reproduction? Where mechanical copies may be seen as strangely similar to each other, the digital copy is identical to the source, and in essence, there is no original, and there is no copy.

So … instead of lamenting the loss – how about we try to envisage for a second the extraordinary reach of the museum A flood of museum texts are now freely flowing across electronic networks, both from, and by the museum and, in certain web 2.0 cases, also to the museum. And if you once felt that you were not comfortable going to a museum that seems so formidably inaccessible, the online museum does seem to do a pretty good job of shifting intellectual access to collections from once wall-bound physical museum. In fact if you prefer to stay at home, you might be pleased to discover those very same objects of wonder are now coming to you on the little screen in your very own home/school, and even at the office (between work commitments that is of course). The only barrier to your claiming your own stake of cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu), and becoming an instant connoisseur of contemporary, conceptual, or simply modern art is now the glass (and now totally transparent) window of your computer.



This is probably enough for one evening, and I suspect that I am preaching to the choir as the only people actually reading blog that is called Musing the Musesphere is probably someone who is already completely at home in the museum anyway. Still – for those who want to walk a little further with me – I do want to visit the idea of Barthes' punktum in my next blog to try and work out how online museums can still act to punctuate your lives!