This thought hasn’t left my mind since I listened to this podcast about the movie ‘Tim’s Vermeer’. In art, does the end justify the means? Tim is Tim Jenison, a Texas-based inventor and software developer, who thinks it is very possible that Vermeer, the great 17th-century Dutch painter, was using technology to paint his masterpieces, and able to produce these amazing compositions, which have an undeniable photographic appearance, without a lot of training. The movie, directed by Teller from the magician duo Penn and Teller, shows Tim Jenison demonstrating how Vermeer was probably not only using the old camera obscure trick, but was also using more complex mirror reflections to trace the shape and the colors directly on the canvas. Jenison demonstrates the process in the documentary, making a perfect copy of a black and white photograph of his father and even goes to the length of recreate the artist’s masterpiece ‘The Music Lesson’. For accomplish this, he didn’t want to make a copy from the original painting, he wanted to do it from scratch! So he rebuilt the scene that Vermeer painted, an exact copy of the painter’s Delft studio with the exact same furniture, colors and people, and he demonstrated he could paint it just like Vermeer did, using mirrors!
For Jenison, this can explain the photographic nature of a Vermeer, the out of focus, the subtle gradations of light not noticeable to the human eye and present in Vermeer’s paintings, and the fact that he was painting directly on the canvas, without drawing first. Plus apparently, optic was very big at the time in the Netherlands. Of course, Vermeer’s fans are gonna be offended by such a claim, after all there is no formal proof he was really doing this, but this is also asking a fundamental question in art: Does this remove all magic from a Vermeer’s painting? Does technology help art or make it cheaper, because suddenly everyone can be Vermeer with a few mirrors and a lot of patience? Can an artist also be a technician, or does this remove all value in art?
These are essential questions, which find their equivalent in music of course. With all the computer technology available these days, a computer is the ultimate instrument capable of reproducing any instrument, capable of manipulating any sound. I rarely see a band which doesn’t use technology on stage, and it would be crazy to think it is not acceptable. Technology affects music in a lot of ways but does it cheapen it like Vermeer’s mirrors? Let’s be honest, I have a computer and can’t create music, just like Jenison’s Vermeer can’t match the original for some obscure reasons according to the critics – I still have to go see the movie to judge by myself. Technology doesn’t cheapen art, but it may erase the god-like aspect of the inspiration that some people like to see in art, and this may be a good thing. As Teller said in an interview, ‘art is work like anything else – concentration, physical pain’,… adding that how an artist manages ‘to get there is irrelevant’, since ‘there are no rules in art’. At the end, technology removes the supernatural dimension of an artist, it kills the mystic we like to see in them, they become humans, artists, scientists and techies all at once, just working hard to get there.