161 words about A Reasonable Facsimile

Click for facsimile

It doesn’t translate to your screen. Paint and canvas as materials have to be experienced in person, this is why we have museums, but this one looks especially ugly on your laptop or phone. The shit-browns and piss-yellows, the lumpy airship quality of its subject. At least Monet’s stuff is still pretty, its luminous smudges roughly legible in the windowpanes of an image search. A reasonable facsimile of “A Reasonable Facsimile” suffers a fatal degree of degradation. You need to be breathing on it, stand with it a while, to feel it. In JPEG form, I see someone who went through a lot of schooling to produce an erudite children’s drawing. In the room I have seen a sad and brilliant creature in the melting sun, tilled and overgrown land, a buoyant mass drifting across the sky. It’s a living thing; I consider it a friend. And we’ve all seen our friends through screens now, and know it’s not the same.