Is this thing on?

Hello, I think you do a disservice to women here, in the guise of praising them. You say "women are wiser than this," but it's only a way of essentializing them, putting them in a fixed box. And saying that a woman has a "tragic" need for a man, you're diminishing women generally as emotionally needy, a familiar stereotype.

A wiser man than you would let women be, would let them become the multifaceted people they can become--would watch and listen, to see what a woman offers, rather than predicting and pre-determining what she wants based on a single frame.

Do I detect some bitterness here?

I saw this same cover, and took pause at it as well. However, my analysis stopped at its simple irony: the two people are looking at a tiny, reduced-quality, digital reproduction of what is standing before them. I appreciate your digging deeper.

Cameras are the most dubious of "tools," as you'll see in a moment. Whereas a easel and palette are (of course!) a vessel for capturing light, for making pictures, cameras are rather more like handheld video games. They are full of settings and switches, needing to set the aperture, focus rings, and shutter speed—and not only this, they can also be upgraded. The film speed, film grain, and the lens can be forever interchanged, providing opportunities to experiment, to buy, and to peruse catalogs and hobbyist magazines—all with the veneer of a respectable, even artistic, hobby (unlike riding a motorcycle, which raises eyebrows). It is a boy's dream, a Game Boy, dressed in grownup's clothes.

Grow up and stop wanking off over your own writing. I respected this work until the pot shot at photography.

And what sort of woman doesn't like photographs? "No substitute for the present moment"? Of course not, but that doesn't devalue the print of a memory, most women love looking through pictures of vacations, etc.

I noticed, by chance, that this NYer cover is a riff on a Norman Rockwell painting titled The Connoisseur. (A google image search will show you many examples.) The Rockwell "original" is itself a comment on how we look at art, and how we look at ourselves looking.

I'm not familiar with your writing enough to make a judgment on this. I don't know whether to laugh at you... or with you.

The overly-dramatic style, the totally off base (and perhaps ignorant) "art interpretation," the stereotypes, and the obvious projection really confuse me as to whether you're trying to be funny or not.

Now I know how Andy Kaufman's audiences felt.

Interesting take - minus the shot at photography of course. A Gameboy in grown-up's clothes? Quite different in my opinion. Nice write up though.

Jason: I make no pot-shot at photography. I have something to say about digital photography, and I have a large beef with taking photos of paintings. With a camera, you can create pictures, and that is a fine thing. But the boy in this picture is trying to capture something that can't be captured: the experience of an original artwork.

There was something facetious (and, really, too dry) in my line about film cameras being "of course" vessels for capturing light. But I'm hoping to argue that digital cameras do shift the use-case from "picture-making" to "device-fiddling."

Manual cameras really never got much uptake from fiddlers: they were as often as not used by people who wanted to develop a craft of picture-making. By contrast, digital cameras are diverting even if you don't want to develop a craft: you can play with the "sepia" button and adjust the resolution and so on, and that constitutes a hobby. Of course, film cameras support a certain amount of that, too, but digital cameras support it a lot better, and are being used that way at a huge scale. I think this picture is partly a critique of the "fiddlers'" approach.

Sarah: Good catch! That's an interesting comparison. I suppose Mr. Bliss is well aware of the Rockwell painting.

Andy: Mostly, I'm just describing what I see in the picture. If you see something different, I encourage you to share.

My musings about what happens after the scene are pure fancy, I grant you that.

There's a lot of hyperbole here, too, and I realize it may offend. I hope to get all your juices flowing, to dare you to share your views on the subject. I'm quite pleased that you have.

Would anyone care to offer a reading of the picture? I'm particularly interested in the relationship between the two figures. What do they see in each other, and what are they thinking?

what exactly is the boy trying to 'devise'?

It's about information and experience in the digital age. They're not looking at the painting directly. They're looking at the photo on the screen. By implication, they're more concerned with the photo than the experience. "First thing: take a picture." It's consumerist, reductive. It's like the tourists who walk around with a camcorder to their face: it's true they'll have something to watch later, but it's also true that they experienced it all only through the lens of the camera, the portal of the screen.

"Devise" should've been "device"—Thanks ctrlalteredmind.

This is very interesting, even though I don't necessarily agree. After seeing the cover (came here via Kottke) for the first time on your post, I immediately related. This is to some degree how I spent a recent vacation in France.

But my impression (and I'll let my girlfriend speak for herself) was that the camera was a way of interacting with our overwhelming surroundings. I wasn't trying to "capture" our trip, or even record or replicate the art around us. I was trying to have more fun in the moment, by interacting with the camera.

The 6th photo down on this page is one such example. I started taking pictures of ceilings, and all of a sudden it became this game. We'd walk into a room and my girlfriend would point out interesting "upskirt" shots. Soon it became a sort of performance art, with people wondering what the heck we were doing laying the camera on the floor like some kind of grenade. And then they got it (looking up) and smiled.

All this to say, sometimes pervasive ubiquious technology (like digital cameras have become) actually have positive social effects---think about digital cameras at parties, people passing cameras around, taking pictures of each other making faces cracking up at the result.

Wait a minute: You "suppose" Harry Bliss is aware of the Rockwell painting???? YOU yourself weren't aware that the Bliss New Yorker cover is an almost note-for-note duplication of that well-known painting? And you say "Good catch!" to Sarah like she discovered something profound instead of something obvious? What's your game, exactly? Who are you attempting to bullshit with all this? I don't get it.

Justin: I'd agree with you that cameras (digital or otherwise) aren't all bad. It sounds like you were playing with your camera in a creative way, making pictures out of the place, rather than using it as a distraction or a barrier between you and the experience—particularly with the "making faces" example, where it became a new project. Rather than replicating the texture of a painting, and then becoming diverted by the camera's replica, you were generating new pictures, which is the crucial distinction, I think.

You said you won't speak for your girlfriend, so I'll be interesting in what she has to say.

As a woman of similar age and position (both my partner and I are young creatives, he is a coder but so am I) I find this completely condescending. Describing women in "body" terms, she cooks for him and demures to him -- have we still not gotten past these stereotypes?

If you take a look around you, you'll see a large number of young ladies with digital cameras and Nintendo handhelds. I am involved in the gaming industry, and it has become quite apparent in the last few years that girls are very interested in gadgetry and games. To deny that girls have this tendency as well is incorrect, to somehow glorify it is aggravating. Where is the supposed "wisdom" in being anti-play?

I absolutely enjoyed what you wrote and commented on, and I think I got a wake-up call reading through the comments this entry has generated. I don't really understand why there's a couple of folks who seem to enjoy nitpicking and criticising you, but I guess that's life.

I do think it's a critique on the 'fiddlers' of our young generation. And I think it's worth exploring what will it all mean, especially in the area of relationships.

I'll try to read your other writings.

Oh, just shut the fuck up.

i haven't read every line of the thread but another interpretation ( because art / life is open to individual interpretation ) is irony / humor. this hipster couple has no capacity to deal with the BIG picture. they ( and i see them as a couple - not emblematic of a man and woman ) must reduce “it� down to a screen to be seen, recorded, chatted up and forgotten. even though a vast canvas of color stretches before them they are reduced to trying to capture its glory in some small fraction of its original scope.

but hey i'm just a working slug and i gotta get off to work.

bene: Thanks very much for your critical take.

You ask about the stereotype of women and whether we've gotten "past" it. I deployed the stereotype here because I think that's partly what the picture is signalling. Reading the body language of the two figures, I think they stand in this stereotypical relationship. I pushed it way over the top, inventing all that stuff about cooking and ballgames and so on; but would you say that her posture in the picture is *not* demure? The way she curves away from him, and clasps her hands behind her back.

We all have a right to take up space, but I fear that this woman has internalized a sense that she ought to make space for the man. The man makes little apology for his place in the room—he inherits the "center" of the culture, without even realizing it.

And it's true that girls and women are taking up handheld games and other gizmos, but I still think men do the lion's share of it, so I'm prodding them here.

Finally, you asked about the wisdom of being "anti-play," and that's a very interesting issue, which I'd like to explore. Briefly, I don't think this guy is "playing" in the good sense. In the good sense, play can teach us things, and it can be a medium for people to connect with each other; I don't think he's doing either. He only staves off boredom with this toy, and is missing opportunities to grow instead—I think.

more about this generations need to document...everything. auto/self recording.
they would rather look at the small than the real and large?

see the original by Rockwell

Spot on. I think you deployed the sexist stereotypes to devastating effect -- yes, there are *some* women who love gadgets, but not *this* one. Note that she holds the paper program for the exhibition behind her back. I imagine her saying wistfully, to her bedheaded, noncommittal boyfriend, "Mm, that's nice honey." It's the perversion of "Only connect" we're living these days -- connect virtually, filter and file every experience with technology as you're having it. Bravo.

The problem I have with this critique is the implicit assumption that experience with a painting is genuine, but experience with a camera is not. We are told that somehow, gadgets and technology in general, interfere with experience, but how can they? Interacting with gadgets is a type of experience, and a popular one at that. What about it is "unreal"?

"They're more concerned with the photo than the experience?" No, they are more concerned with the experience of the camera than the experience of the painting. Who are you to tell us which is better? This critique is nothing but an arbitrary prioritization of one's own aesthetic choices.

In any relationship, your partner may choose to experience life in ways that are different from you preferred choices. A mature person is not sent into fits of insecurity and neediness causing them to pathologize the other person for revealing the obvious fact that there are two difference people having two different experiences. Relationship occurs within a shared dialog of two independent experiences, not in the codependent illusion-making denial of difference.

Hi Ezra,

At first I took this as sort of a snarky look at our generation, and our gadgety hipster ways.

But I got to thinking about why someone would use a camera in that situation. I use my camera all the time for botany; if you don't have a hand lens then taking a close-up and zooming in on it can be a nice substitute. It's hard to see, but even on the full size printed cover it's not clear that what's on the camera screen is a representation of the whole canvas. If it's only partial, the camera may be working as a magnifying glass for these folks. This is a different kettle of fish from seeing only through the camera lens!

So the interpretation that ended up pleasing me was that these kids were artists, making note of something or looking into it more closely at the museum.

As for the gender dynamics, I dunno... I definitely read this at first as something they were doing together, and didn't see one as obviously being more into it than the other. But your take on the gal's body language seems good. But even given that, I have a hard time following your extrapolation of that into their relationship. Maybe her mind's just on the rock concert she has to play guitar at that evening! I feel like a look like hers could correspond with a bunch of different personalities and lifestyles.

mike-2: I didn't say that the camera was "unreal"—but I do claim that it is a distraction.

For my own part, I used to think that painting was just a low-tech way of making pictures: that a painting itself was just a picture, and that there wasn't much difference between a painting in a gallery and its reproduction in a book.

But a painting is a physical object, with particular qualities of scale, depth, texture, placement, and more (maybe smell?). Any reproduction of it necessarily strips away many of these qualities. Most of us don't learn to stand before a work of art and take it in with all five senses—and so there's a temptation to feel that taking a picture of a painting is just making a convenient copy, like copying a JPEG; but this throws away most of the experience.

So I don't think I'm making quite an "arbitrary" preference of one aesthetic over another. Certainly, industrial objects can have aesthetic virtues of their own. But is that why you go to a gallery—to admire the aesthetics of your own camera? I fear that's what this fellow is doing!—and missing a chance to enjoy the materiality of the canvas.

Rather than making an arbitrary preference, I'm trying to assert that works of art have any value at all.

People are touchy, dude. Especially people who sit at their computers reading Kottke, suddenly confronted with a post that even mildly threatens to call bullshit on their own tendencies toward mediated rather than direct experience.

Anyway man, keep on rockin.

The camera guy, by choosing one experience over another, necessarily misses out on something. I don't doubt that, nor do I doubt that what he is missing is good and wonderful, even awesome, but we could say the same thing about an artist mixing paints in front of a sunset. This too is 'throwing away' most of the experience.

What the camera guy is experiencing is not merely the aesthetics of an industrial object, but something more like the sunset painter -- there is something intimate and even tactile about capturing one's subjective experience in an objective form. But where did the camera guy learn that such an activity was worthwhile? From artists. The tragedy of romantic individualism in art is that it destroys its own audience. No-one goes to galleries because they are all busy pursuing their dreams of being artist-rockstars.

Jared, in what sense is standing in a gallery staring at a painting an unmediated experience? The entire experience is filtered through a vast cultural narrative about what art should be and what galleries are and what sort of people go to them, and what the social consequences of being interested in art are. All of these factors construct your supposedly 'direct' experience, since its much more than being in a white room with colored canvas sheets on the walls.

A painter painting a sunset could pretty well do the same thing that the guy on this cover is doing, I suppose, but it would be less likely. When making a painting, you're forced to pay attention to the thing you're seeing, to look closely at it. With cameras, you don't have to: you can just click away. (It's my belief that to make really interesting photographs, you do have to pay close attention, but that's another story!)

Also, it is significant that the painting here is a splatter painting: it doesn't depict anything. The photographer, I suspect, does try to depict something, namely the painting. I think he's taking the picture in order to show his friends later, "Look at this painting I saw." (And a painter could do that too: "Look at this sunset I saw"—no better).

Then again, maybe he's not just trying to capture it. Maybe he's doing something creative, maybe there's some kind of synthesis going on in his mind, or will happen later on. It's possible that he's using it as a magnifying glass, as Desultor said, though I suspect Desultor is the only person who does that!

For me, though, the second figure's stance adds a lot to my understanding of the picture. The way she stands off, seeming slightly bored or disengaged, makes me think that he's not being terribly creative. That's much unlike the kind of thing that Justin described, of two people very excited about the point of view they were taking with the camera.

So all in all there are a lot of features of the picture that work together to make it, for me, such a tight network of powerful meanings. Many of the things you say, mike-2, I'd agree with, at least on a philosophical level, but that doesn't keep this picture from punching me in the gut with a message, an injunction to pay attention to what's in front of me, and to attend to my relationships with other people.

I don't think she's standing off.

I think that's her posture; that's the way a girl like that who goes out with a guy like that would actually stand.

I know myself a bit; I am verbal. I have come to notice that the others who might be less obnoxiously loud than me often choose to show who they are by clothing, style, body language, aesthetics, etc. This woman stands like a quiet, brilliant, hip poet-girl: mildly self-effacing and fragile but happy to be engaged. Her posture does not bespeak her reticence to me; rather, her stance is her personality encapsulated. Without jewelry nor a view of the glasses we all assume she wears, we have only her posture to show us that this girl in this simple outfit is not some rich girl or loud lawyer type who's totally wrong for this guy. No, her stance shows us that she's part of his subculture, with her flipped-out hair and her inquisitive though slightly awkward head lean.

It's adorable.

Its hilarious that you read so much into the cover of the New Yorker without even realizing there was an original to compare it to. When you do compare it, the woman in the picture is taking on the stance of the viewer in the original, hands behind her back clutching a map or pamphlet. This may be a hip version of the original, leaving the old-fashioned umbrella and gloves at home in favour of the younger generation clothes and the hip new haircuts, but the clear intention of this cover is not some sexist commentary on society, but rather the generational divide that has occurred with the invention of the latest technologies. The man in the original is staring straight at the artwork, trying to capture the message (if any) from an abstract painting trying to take it all in. The couple in the New Yorker image is seeing the painting through the lens of a digital camera, because since the instruments conception, people have realized the power of being able to take one hundred pictures and keeping only a few, and this has changed a lot of the way we do things in this decade. And the artist is making an interesting comment on the change this has created in our society.

I think youve sparked a lot of debate on the topic here because of two reasons: The covers actual message on our generations society and the consequences of living in a technology-filled world is debatable but also because your reading of the relationship of the two individuals is infantile and sexist. But thats just one opinion, one interpretation.

Another possibility... Theyre using the camera to case the museum so they may return that night and steal the painting.

Lindsay T. Great

Its hilarious that you read so much into the cover of the New Yorker without even realizing there was an original to compare it to. When you do compare it, the woman in the picture is taking on the stance of the viewer in the original, hands behind her back clutching a map or pamphlet. This may be a hip version of the original, leaving the old-fashioned umbrella and gloves at home in favour of the younger generation clothes and the hip new haircuts, but the clear intention of this cover is not some sexist commentary on society, but rather the generational divide that has occurred with the invention of the latest technologies. The man in the original is staring straight at the artwork, trying to capture the message (if any) from an abstract painting trying to take it all in. The couple in the New Yorker image is seeing the painting through the lens of a digital camera, because since the instruments conception, people have realized the power of being able to take one hundred pictures and keeping only a few, and this has changed a lot of the way we do things in this decade. And the artist is making an interesting comment on the change this has created in our society.

I think youve sparked a lot of debate on the topic here because of two reasons: The covers actual message on our generations society and the consequences of living in a technology-filled world is debatable but also because your reading of the relationship of the two individuals is infantile and sexist. But thats just one opinion, one interpretation.

Another possibility... Theyre using the camera to case the museum so they may return that night and steal the painting.

Its hilarious that you read so much into the cover of the New Yorker without even realizing there was an original to compare it to. When you do compare it, the woman in the picture is taking on the stance of the viewer in the original, hands behind her back clutching a map or pamphlet. This may be a hip version of the original, leaving the old-fashioned umbrella and gloves at home in favour of the younger generation clothes and the hip new haircuts, but the clear intention of this cover is not some sexist commentary on society, but rather the generational divide that has occurred with the invention of the latest technologies. The man in the original is staring straight at the artwork, trying to capture the message (if any) from an abstract painting trying to take it all in. The couple in the New Yorker image is seeing the painting through the lens of a digital camera, because since the instruments conception, people have realized the power of being able to take one hundred pictures and keeping only a few, and this has changed a lot of the way we do things in this decade. And the artist is making an interesting comment on the change this has created in our society.

I think youve sparked a lot of debate on the topic here because of two reasons: The covers actual message on our generations society and the consequences of living in a technology-filled world is debatable but also because your reading of the relationship of the two individuals is infantile and sexist. But thats just one opinion, one interpretation.

Another possibility... Theyre using the camera to case the museum so they may return that night and steal the painting.

Hi Lindsay—Thanks for your comments. Yeah, I didn't know about the Rockwell painting before, I guess some others did; that's life I guess. And though his clasped hands (in the Rockwell) are similar to the girl's on this cover, her posture is quite different, so I still see this picture as a big departure from the older one.

I'm glad I was able to spark debate through this infantile and sexist commentary. Onwards and upwards!

I only take umbrage at one of your points: that I suggested the cover was making a sexist commentary. I don't think that the cover makes such a commentary and I don't think I implied that.

My response was certainly essentialist (and sexist in that way), in saying things like "Women are wiser than this" and that men just want to play with toys. But the picture is a document of a sexist society, and maybe even a gentle critique.

Thanks again for contributing! I hope you're not turned away by what you see as sexism in the post.

I just reread this post, and I still enjoy it.

I got here looking for "feynman chase skirt play bongo" on google images, looking for a recent flow chart on the subject, but Google Images returned this blog post, somehow.

Anyways, that is one of my favourite New Yorker covers, and if I weren't so squeamish about ripping my magazines apart it would be hanging on my wall.

I took the more obvious interpretation, the "victims of the electronic age" angle, where even though they're standing before what they're supposed to be experiencing, they're more concerned with recording the experience.

I'm glad I read the comments to this post. I suspected but never knew there was an original it was referencing! That makes it so much more awesome.