I freely admit that the Facebook phenomenon, actually just about anything in the electronic age seems more than a bit alien. Us with our avocation makes this rather easier to understand. Psychically we have feet comfortably planted in the 18th century. Mind you, despite our métier, Facebook is lots of fun, and after watching ‘The Social Network’, it’s abundantly clear that, say what you want, the site is still largely a beauty contest. What is yet impossible to communicate electronically, however, are those areas of sensual beauty that exceed the visual. With all that, even the visual leaves something to be desired as, no matter the pixels, one can’t substitute beholding the object of one’s desire firsthand. That’s actually why I read art history in London. An object based discipline, one wants to be around the objects with which London’s collections, more than anywhere else in the world, are replete. I have often heard it said that American art historians are distinguished as those who come up with lots of methodologies and build elaborate tropes- something that they might not necessarily do if they had access to, and consequently gloried in, more of the objects they write about with such prolixity. ‘In the flesh’ is a phrase that has so much to recommend.
Moreover, one finds comeliness not just in the visual, even when the visual as virtual is as accurate as current technologies can make it. I was reminded of this in spades, showing a discriminating client the hidden interior drawers of an exquisite William and Mary period japanned cabinet. While we are always asked what we’ve found in the innumerable hidden drawers our many items bought and sold over the years have possessed, my standard rejoinder has always been ‘Period dust.’ But in the most recent instance, I asked my client, with her nose within the cabinet interior, to inhale deeply. And by way of showing her how, I did, too. Nothing, I mean nothing can replicate the aroma that time has wrought in old wood, consonant with 300 years of existence. And of course, this is a sensual side aspect of beauty that is impossible to communicate electronically. Assuming one has simply a connoisseurship of the visual, I can only say that you are forgoing an experience possibly not resulting in a stir to the genitals, but possibly so, but certainly otherwise exceptional.