Exploring the emerging digital scene in Art History and museum practice
| Autor | Alexandros Teneketzis |
| Páginas | 187-206 |
Esboços, Florianópolis, v. 27, n. 45, p. 187-206, maio/ago. 2020.
ISSN 2175-7976 DOI https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2020.e67954 188/345
ABSTRACT
in Greece and internationally, in order to examine, record and analyse the extent of usage and the
particular focus on examining the degree to which Greek institutions of culture and arts, as a case study
in Europe, use state-of-the-art digital technologies (e.g., semantic technologies, augmented reality, and
ubiquitous computing) for (a) storing, managing and documenting artworks together with all relevant
knowledge/information; and (b) interpreting and presenting artworks to the public. We will also study
and analyse the degree of interrelation between knowledge/information, and art and cultural heritage
that is currently hosted in distinct cultural and art institutions around Greece, as well as between Greek
institutions and relevant projects abroad. In this context, the issue at stake is the identity and the way
Art History is exercised.
KEYWORDS
Digital Art History. Digital tools. Digital public space.
Esboços, Florianópolis, v. 27, n. 45, p. 187-206, maio/ago. 2020.
ISSN 2175-7976 DOI https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2020.e67954
Exploring the emerging digital scene in Art History and museum practice
189/345
The term Digital Art History is not new, of course, to the international bibliography.
Already from the end of the past century, without any delay vis-a-vis the other
practices of Digital Humanities, advocates of “analogue” Art History began to
delve systematically into the then emerging computer-assisted processes and, soon
after, into digital technology (ZWEIG, 2015, p. 40-41; BENTKOWSKA-KAFEL, 2015,
p. 55-58). Admittedly, we live in a world where we communicate visually like never
before, “inside oculacentric Western culture” (KARAMPA, 2018, p. 96). Art History
possesses the tools and the experts capable of analysing and interpreting the visual
culture and visual objects (KLINKE; SURKEMPER, 2016, p. 9), perhaps transforming
in this way our discipline into visual studies, justifying the “so called visual turn of
the 1990s” (GUIOKA, 2018, p. 12). At this point, however, Hans Belting observation
that the debate on “whether art history, without losing its inherited particularity, should
others”, is a pseudo dilemma. Belting is clearly in favour of dealing with anything that
may be called a visual phenomenon (2018, p. 27).
As art historians, we have only marginally studied the impact of this evolution on
our methodology and on the way we work, as well as on the essence of our discipline.
Questions like the following will continue to be raised in the future: how – and in what
recognize the quality of artefacts or the interpretative process?
This raises yet another question: Are we moving closer to what Erwin Panofksy
ironically called “rejection of the originals”? This issue will become even more pressing
as the works of art are being transformed into images that people worship and
increasingly use, unlike the physical objects themselves, while they can access them
in thousands, beyond the natural human capabilities (KLINKE, 2019, p. 16-19). Like
the discovery and use of photography within the Art History framework, this fact goes
– “photographic picture of a microscopic object can under certain circumstances be
more important than [the object] itself” (BREDEKAMP, 2003, p. 102).
In recent years, however, the state-of-the-art in artwork presentation and
dissemination practices has shifted more and more from the public museum space to
the private space of a teaching room or a living room, and back to the virtual public space
through the Internet. At the same time, as a result of those changes, the study of Art History
per se is being gradually transformed into the study of digital Art History. The study of
artworks and their impact is now being re-initiated within the new, evolving digital scene.
Drawing on the above-mentioned landscape, this paper explores this new digital
study, record and analyse the degree of interrelation between knowledge/information, on
cultural and art institutions around Greece, but also abroad. Furthermore, the study will
examine the degree to which digital tools for artwork management and documentation
adopted by Greek institutions are exploited in a way that actually enhances cultural
content, but also knowledge discovery, thereby leading to a more complete and
insightful presentation of exhibits. We will also study the current practices for digitally
exhibiting and presenting artwork (online or in situ), in order to examine the degree to
on factors such as: the quality of user-machine interactions, that is, the quality and
characteristics of the broader user experience achieved through technological means
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