Gazes, memes, and tourism

Universal Experience as Contrast has given me so many new ways of seeing. The gaze was a notable subject of discussion in one of my art history courses, Gender, Representation and Visual Arts. How does the viewer’s gaze interact with the art? How does gender and sexuality play a role in the gaze? Often the gaze is a form of consumption. The viewer can look at an oil painting, a photograph, a video, and the bodies cannot look back. Yet the tourist gaze can be confronted by eyes, either painted or photographed. What does it mean when the eyes look back at you, though not real? In James Elkins The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing Elkins points out human tendency to find eyes and faces in everything we see. We desire the familiarity of the face and yet we can often be confronted by the uncanny instead of the familiar.

 Yet most often the gaze is all-consuming. We take and give nothing back. Could this problem be solved with electracy? How can we produce something that is not meant to be consumed but is meant to be thought-provoking and for the benefit of well-being? Perhaps those are our instructions. Recreate tourism, not for capitalism, but for well-being. What is tourism? I see tourism as a purposeful temporary displacement meant to glean something from outside the everyday. Yet as my group discussed it, it seems that most “tourist attractions” are based on hype and fictions perpetuated by capitalists. We discussed again the idea of whether it is necessary to travel to the authentic location to gain the full experience. Is the Mona Lisa authentic if it’s highly guarded inside a museum where you cannot get up close? Does defining authenticity belong to the author of the original work? The Sistine Chapel seems authentic in that case since it’s never been moved. But what if geologists prove that due to plate tectonic activity, the Sistine chapel is three inches west of where it originally stood? Does that change how the light hit the painting at a certain time of day? Does it make the viewing less authentic? We know for certain that many paintings have crackled and lost their original vibrant hue, but we’ve only known them in their reverent sepia form. Certainly restoration is it’s own problem, Ecce Homo a chief example.

http://www.jest.com/article/197627/11-best-remixes-of-the-botched-ecce-homo-painting

Walter Benjamin calls “aura” what is subtracted when the original is reproduced. Many remain skeptical of the concept of aura. Does originality and authenticity constitute an aura that cannot be reproduced? Electracy almost necessarily demands something that can replicated, reproduced, re-experienced. With the internet as the institution for electracy, only projects like the Wayback Machine would be able to prove authenticity of a webpage. An exciting aspect of the internet is the lack of established authorship. When one starts a meme, it does not bear signature. It is passed around and its authenticity bears no relation to its potency. I believe the internet is our greatest resource and asset in reconfiguring tourism to benefit well-being and each work of art, whether in a Museum of Contemporary art or as a meme on the internet, can serve as a baseline to build up our own.