It is hard to recall the first time I saw a photograph that recreates a famous painting. Yet, I definitely remember that when Google Arts launched their “selfie” application, which allowed users to find their painting-twins, the number of attempts drastically increased. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, museums all around the world are challenging their longed visitors to engage with their paintings via calls for recreation.
Everything started when the Instagram account Tussen Kunst & Quarantaine trended its users’ creative quarantine shoots, in which people were challenged to depict an arts scene with only three objects they had chosen at home. The attempts were not only creative in a funny way but also pleasing to the eye with the obvious effort put into them. Following the trend, other museums and art institutions worldwide invited their old visitors to perform the same activity. The Getty Museum in LA, Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and National Museum in London were all on the bandwagon.
In the world of hashtag clashes and click wars, this aesthetic and humorous challenge not only recollected the old visitors of the museums but also advertised the host institutions to the other art lovers who are not aware of them. However, the only ones that get the marketing are not the institutions themselves but the paintings that are promoted within the posts. The unknown, unsung paintings are now traveling on the extensive rails of the network, introducing various artists and styles to the twenty-first century. The underrepresented works are now at least getting familiarized to the eyes of the web, if not taught to them. Either by scrolling down the whole museum catalog to find a doable painting to recreate or by getting exposed to the before/after photographs on the recommended sections, people have started to recognize a larger range of paintings.
This challenge has also stimulated the creativity of our home-stuck, bored minds. Long known high-budgeted costume production is now in the hands of a paper roll, a blanket, and an eye to capture the scene in the right way; The result is a perfectly combined Renaissance outfit, a Victorian pose, or a modern frame. Even though most of the recreations ridicule the measures taken due to the pandemic and the limits of our houses, a countable minority of the photographs remind us that the only thing we need to create is just a little motivation and imagination.
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