Project 52 Week 17
I work with film, and I don't like to take pictures of food. Pictures of food became a thing when we all started carrying high powered digital cameras in our pockets... except... not really. Right now I am reading a book series that takes place a few hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse and about half of the first 2 books takes place on a space station ark orbiting earth. One of the characters talks about the relics brought from earth during the cataclysm hanging in the president's office. He talks about a painting of a woman with an enigmatic smile. It is supposed to be obvious that this painting is the Mona Lisa, but after 300 years no one is certain who this woman is or why she was saved. All art on the space station is protected by 2 inch thick bullet proof glass, displayed in the safest, environmentally controlled rooms. As I read it, I wonder what pieces of art we really would try to save and carry onto the ark, if we knew the end was coming. Would any of those oil paintings of bowls of fruit, that seem so popular in art classes and have even made it into some museums as "important pieces" make the cut? Would our instagrams of decadent chocolate cakes and filtered nature shots, so carefully curated to show off our aesthetic, be worth saving?
In the film Monuments Men the lead character gives a speech about why they have waded into the middle of the second world war for the soul purpose of saving art. In it he says that you "can kill an entire generation, but if we destroy their achievements it will be as if they never existed." The idea that art and history are worth saving, worth risking their lives for, because that is the memory of who we are. Our cumulative achievements that are not meant for one man or to be destroyed and locked away. Something that is meant to be shared and remembered.
It is easy to say that these small "mundane" things that we choose to share on the internet are not worth saving because they are not important. No one will risk their lives to carry the picture I took of myself in my new shirt onto the lifeboat at the end of the world. None of the photographs pasted to my wall are going to be considered masterworks, a piece of our global memory. Does that mean they have no value?
They are our memory, and, as such, aren't they precious?
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