>>YES: URBAN MYTHS ABOUND.
>>
>>Roger Garland
>>National Museum of Australia
>>[log in to unmask]
>>
>>In response to:
>>This discussion brings to mind the rumors I have heard about Bill Gates
>>having high definition virtual images on the walls of his new home instead
>>of actual paintings. Now I would have thought a person of his wealth would
>>want to have the real items.
 
>I think the art is real. It is Bill Gates who is the Virtual image.
>
>Linda Tanaka
 
This is from the NYTimes and seemed approiate to this discussion (especially
once Bill was mentioned.)
Chrissie Devinney
[log in to unmask]
 
COMPUTERS: An Electronic Gallery of Rare Art
 
 
Feb. 14, 1995
 
An Electronic Gallery of Rare Art
 
By STEPHEN MANES
 
 
   BEFORE World War I, a Philadelphia millionaire named Dr. Albert C. Barnes
began assembling a striking personal collection of Impressionist,
post-Impressionist and modern art that he kept hidden from public view. In
the 1990's, a Seattle billionaire named Bill Gates has been assembling a
collection of this and much more art in electronic form and is offering it,
for a price, to one and all.
 
   The Corbis Corporation is Mr. Gates's other software company, which,
unlike the Microsoft Corporation, he owns outright. Over the last few years,
the company has acquired the electronic reproduction rights to more than a
quarter of a million images, including some of the world's great art. Corbis
assembled material from the Barnes collection to produce a CD-ROM called A
Passion for Art: Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse and Dr. Barnes, the company's first
commercial product, which will be available for about $45 by March. Like many
recent Windows-based CD-ROM titles, it requires eight megabytes of memory,
but unlike most, it requires virtually no hard drive space. A Macintosh
version is set for May.
 
   The title is somewhat misleading. Dr. Barnes did collect the three named
artists aggressively, but his collection has a far wider reach. Dr. Barnes
personally met only Matisse, from whom he commissioned a huge mural called
"The Dance" for a tricky space in his gallery's main hall. The disk's
introductory material includes a short documentary-style production on the
making of this great work, along with a discussion of the collection's female
nude images and a guided tour of the gallery.
 
   What might be called a mockumentary pays direct homage to the News on the
March newsreel in the film "Citizen Kane" and emphasizes the quirky
irascibility of Dr. Barnes. The effect is marred by some unfortunate fudging,
including eye-catching news headlines that are obviously modern mockups and
other items evidently not contemporary with the Barnes era. And in none of
the documentaries is there any way to stop the action to view a particularly
interesting image, such as an early version of "The Dance." The interactivity
in these sections is less than with a videotape.
 
   But there are almost endless ways to explore the paintings, many of which
have never been reproduced before. "I don't want people wandering around from
one painting to another saying, 'Oh, how pretty!' while their children slide
around on the parquet floors," Dr. Barnes once declared. He maintained the
collection as an educational facility, closed it to outsiders and refused to
loan paintings to other institutions or allow them to be reproduced. After
his death (and in apparent contravention of his will), the Barnes Foundation
eventually opened the gallery doors grudgingly and permitted a traveling
exhibition of some of the works. Since the images are largely unfamiliar,
discovering them is like stumbling into a boarded-up house haunted by great
artists.
 
   Dr. Barnes arranged his collection in his own unique way, hanging
paintings from floor to ceiling to emphasize their formal relationships
rather than their place in an artist's career or in art history. A Passion
for Art lets you explore these groupings wall by wall; unfortunately, many of
the frames display only gray hints of what is in them, fragmenting Dr.
Barnes's intentions. Because so much is omitted, one misses the refreshing
way an in-person tour shows just how much bad art great artists could create.
 
 
   Still, it is hard to protest that the collection's third-rate canvases
should have nudged out any of the more than 330 paintings here, including
dozens by the title artists as well as exquisite works by Gauguin, Manet,
Monet, Picasso, Rousseau, Seurat, Van Gogh and other masters. Alongside
descriptive text, some of it written by Dr. Barnes himself, each work can be
viewed in miniature; with a click of the mouse, each can be expanded to fill
the screen or zoom beyond its edges, letting you examine detail closely. A
slide show function lets you create your own "collection."
 
   There is a brief biography for every artist; for those with multiple works
on the disk, the software can display miniatures of the paintings in
chronological order. A complete list of the disk collection can be sorted by
artist or title but not, alas, by date.
 
   An "archive" offers audio clips of Dr. Barnes and his friend John Dewey,
the philosopher, along with documentary evidence of the business of art.
Bills, check stubs and original letters detail such things as the clever
chicanery whereby Dr. Barnes urged a dealer to acquire paintings for him in
secret at a reduced price and then tried to cut the dealer's commission.
 
   As attractive as these reproductions are, they remain limited to a
resolution of 640 by 480 dots, with a total of 256 colors. Since modern
computers can often display more than twice as many dots and far more colors,
the compromises here occasionally prove disappointing, particularly with
continuous tones such as flesh, sky or water. Picasso's blue period comes
with robin's-egg flecks; voluptuous Renoir nudes seem on close examination to
have some sort of blotchy skin disease.
 
   Although this is perhaps the best art CD-ROM I have seen, it is not
without irritations. Every mouse click produces an annoying sound, and the
keyboard is largely disabled. Since text is not searchable, there is no way
to know, say, that a mysterious passing reference to the Nabis group is
clarified in great detail in Bonnard's biography. An initially impressive
time line ends up seeming awkward, with snippets of political history here,
literary history there. No catalogue raisonne has yet been developed for the
Barnes collection, but here there is not even an overview of its holdings.
 
   But all these quibbles vanish as you fall under the spell of the glorious
images. As they play upon the screen, they suddenly make debates about
advances in 3-D computer graphics seem delightfully irrelevant.
 
 
Copyright 1995 The New York Times