All Ignorance Tobaggans Into Know

"Black is not a color." -Edouard Manet

Object No.
Examiner. Date.
Title. Artist. Medium. Signature. Marks/Labels. Condition.
Dimensions. Height. Width. Depth (if applicable).
Description of work.
Framed. Unframed.
Notes.

Day four. I am sitting in the seminar room, surrounded by furniture bought in the 1970s, prints made in the 1850s, and my 2008 Macbook with the latest Explosions in the Sky album playing. I am not entirely sure which decade I'm in.

There are hundreds of these prints. They are a collection of etchings based on the artwork and tombs in the Vatican and let me tell you, there is something vaguely unsettling about the statues of the dead so-and-sos. They are more often than not lying down and look as if they're having those really bizarre dubya-tee-eff-elephants-and-Aunt-Sue dreams. (Doesn't everyone have those? Elephants and Aunt Sues, I mean.)

I get to wear the conservation gloves again.

Now here's a tidbit to chew on. A cud of art history, if you will. All of these prints, with their incredible (seriously incroyable) detailing and their hundreds of pages and flawless etchings? Hand-printed. Cynthia also showed me a machine-printed page. Lovely, of course, but the detail was eh and the shading was grid-like. Unremarkable, really. I'm not going to get into a technology discussion, but I would merely like to submit before the panel the following thought: perhaps one of the reasons why art is so beloved is because it is the work of human hands and not the product of one of our soulless creations. This is not at all to disparage the world of graphic design and other computer-based art fields. Nor is this to hate on technology, nor is this an original thought. But after spending 3+ hours poring over 150+ year-old prints, your appreciation for human artistic capacity increases at an impressive rate.

As does your appreciation for pea-green tweed chairs.