I suppose I should have read the fine print. Except that it was in Korean and I was too lazy to find the English version (it was here). I saw the word Goya (rendered in Korean as 고야 ) and recognised the painting in the promotional material and stopped right there. Goyas! In Korea? Count me in!

I missed the bit that said it would be showing his masterpieces ‘across various media’. 

Although Francisco de Goya is not my favourite Spanish painter, he is in my Top 10, not least because he painted during a period of tremendous upheaval in Spain, roughly the late 1780s until his death in 1828. This is a time period I cover in all my books, and Goya provides a window on this world. 

So my husband and I trundled over the Seoul Arts Centre and bought tickets. We even had to wait for an hour to enter, such was the popularity. Finally, after dallying about having a coffee, it was our turn. 

We walked into the first room, which was crowded by people not looking at paintings but instead staring at projections of paintings that faded in and out on a white scrim. I felt a sinking sensation in my chest, and turned to my husband to ask whether there was going to be any actual Goyas in this exhibition. Had we stumbled into an ‘immersive experience’ based on his paintings? Not exactly, but it most certainly was not what I had been expecting. 

Most of the rooms in the show had small digital versions or still reproductions of some of his most famous works, such as The Third of May 1808 (El 3 de Mayo en Madrid). Some digital picture frames rotated through images, like the sort you might use to upload holiday snaps, except in this case loaded with Goyas. There were cardboard cutouts to provide some 3-D, including of Carlos IV from the portrait of the royal family. People had their phones at the ready, happily snapping away at all of it, though it wasn’t exactly immersive, like the recent and popular Van Gogh experiences.

It was something, the question was, what?

There was only one part with actual works, and that came towards the end, a display of Goya’s Los Caprichos, a series of 80 aquatint images from 1799, though even these were from a 5^th edition printing (c. 1881-1886). 

 In these prints, Goya directed his rage at the hypocrisy, ignorance, deceitfulness, and corruption he saw around him in Spain. He skewered everyone in his caricatures, from ordinary people to nobles to members of the Inquisition. The images depict a terrifying world, with women being dragged into the darkness and monstrous figures waiting in the shadows. 

The exhibition drew its title from one of these works, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, pictured left). In that print, a man who symbolises the artist, possibly Goya himself, sleeps with his head on a table, his drawing tools next to him, while owls and bats flutter around him and a cat lies at his feet. As with any work of art, there are numerous ways to interpret this, but the most obvious is that to abandon reason is to open up oneself — or one’s society — to ignorance and evil, as symbolised by the animals, which were long associated with the dark arts of sorcery or witchcraft. 

Truely, this image has something to say about our times. And yet it wasn’t even central in the main exhibition – I had to pick my way through the 80 prints, all roughly the size of a small piece of paper, arranged in such a way it was impossible to see them all in any sort of linear or orderly manner.  

Maybe I was just having a bad day at the arts centre. Or maybe this was indicative of something broader, more worrying? I raced home and dove into Simulacra and Simulation, by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. I had been meaning to read it for a long time, and I wanted to know what it was that I had just experienced. Was it the hyperreal? Or just some poor art reproductions and a badly curated show done on the cheap? (That is, was I overthinking it?). 

Baudrillard described it like this: 

‘ln the same way, with the pretext of saving the original, one forbade visitors to enter the Lascaux caves, but an exact replica was constructed five hundred meters from it, so that everyone could see them (one glances through a peephole at the authentic cave, and then one visits the reconstituted whole). It is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial.’

And yet, I also had to accept that Goya created a work with the intention of it being duplicated by making his Caprichos etchings and not singular paintings. Trying to make sense of mass reproductions then and the use of replicas of art as a stand-in for the originals now was going to take me down a philosophical rabbit hole. Baudrillard was only the beginning – I probably needed to start with Plato and the cave end up with Marx. Which is all good and well, but I eventually realised I wasn’t having a philosophical crisis — I was having a historical one. My issue isn’t with the replication of art, in one sense, but about understanding the moment of the original, in its context: the painting itself as a historical object, not merely an aesthetic one. 

This was probably on my mind given that I had recently seen the Zurbarán exhibition at the National Gallery in London, where the spectacle was the paintings themselves, no need for digital photo carousels. For instance, the 5ft-tall Saint Francis in Meditation (right). 

Certainly, I can reproduce it here. I can make it my screen saver! I can print it on a tote bag! I can have him on the back of a phone case! What I can’t do is replicate the wonder of seeing that painting for the first time. The original. At scale. The drama and mystery of the near-black background, the skull he holds to his chest, how his face is obscured in shadow — these are products of Zurbarán brush, but they are also products of their time: why he paints like he does, and what that tells us about religious art and Spain in the 17^th century. It is something that can be understood by looking at a reproduction, but to be felt, it’s necessary to see the original. 

Art for art’s sake is fine, but the question I’m wrestling with (somewhat unsuccessfully) is if you treat works of art as historical objects, as I often do, how does a viewer make sense of entire exhibitions being staged without the originals? Instead of the work being a bridge to past, the viewer is left with the spectacle of a digitised and reproduced present, one that is meant to represent the past but somehow — perhaps by this displacement — cannot embody it.

This was especially clear to me in the small, final room of the Goya exhibition (pictured left), where a number of works were crammed in, including a replica of Saturn Devouring His Son (Saturno devorando a su hijo), perhaps the most disturbing of Goya’s work. It was one of his ‘Black Paintings’, a series painted directly on to the walls of his house towards the end of his life. The house was later bought and all the paintings were transferred to canvas and taken to the Prado, in Spain. The process might have changed the work in some ways, but Saturno remains a shocking, unsettling painting. In the Seoul exhibition, however, it was just another copy, crammed alongside many others, a final round-up before the exit. 

In one way, something is certainly lost. In other, more generous way of thinking about this, thousands of people who might not have much exposure to Goya were able to engage, at least at a certain level, with his works. It’s the level that can’t be reached that concerns me. Art is stripped of its usefulness as a historical object to be experienced and is turned into a hyperreal proximation designed to entertain. Something is lost in that process, but what and how much is not yet clear, and neither is the ultimate cost in terms of our understanding of not only art, but of the very world that produced it. 

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What I’m … listening to 

I stumbled on to this absolutely essential podcast series (6 episodes) called First America. Maybe I’m following all the wrong people, but I saw nothing about this on any of my social media — which is full of historians! — and instead I happened to hear it via NPR’s Code Switch (from 3 July), when they handed over an entire episode to it. 

First America makes a completely convincing argument that to understand the moment the United States is in right now, you don’t need to look to the Nazis or the Cold War but to … Native American history. For so long, Native American history has been written out or pushed to the margins, but as the excellent historians who participated in the episodes make clear, this history was central to the development and formation of the United States as it is today.

As the host, Rebecca Nagle, explained: 

‘For indigenous people, it’s not like this stuff is easy to talk about. It’s overwhelming, how much our ancestors lost. But we find ways, big and small, to remember, because without that we wouldn’t know who we are and how we got here. The same is true for the United States. Genocide shaped and changed our country. And until we process that violence, we won’t know who we are or how we got here.’

It’s very powerful work, and should be required listening for anyone concerned about the United States. 

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ICYMI – I was on C-SPAN BookTV last week! You can watch it here: https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/the-great-resistance/677230

If you liked this essay, leave a comment. Or buy me a drink! Or treat yourself to one of my books!