Why Make It Digital?
Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany was my crutch throughout the development of the proposal. Given that such an excellent resource is available to the student with time and/or money to track it down, what is the value of my project? More importantly, why is a “born digital” project to be valued as much as simply another book on the subject (although the latter is a time-honored academic tradition)?
The answer lies in the very nature of the original Munich exhibition of 1937. Of the six hundred and fifty or so pieces displayed by the Nazi authorities during the show, over half are missing or verified as destroyed. Hundreds, potentially thousands of other pieces of avant-garde art that were confiscated were lost or burned. It is true that periodic mountings of modern re-enactments of the show, such as that done by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991, raise awareness of this singular event. But art shows run for limited engagements, and even traveling exhibitions can only be seen by a small portion of a population. The surviving pieces from Entartete Kunst have not been displayed together in almost fifteen years, and that show was the first in fifty years. It is conceivable that another real-world presentation of many of the extant pieces will be mounted again, although I would imagine that the centennial of the show in 2037 seems the be the soonest and most likely date for such an exposition.
Thus, the ephemeral nature of the original art show argues for the creation of a current reconstruction. I have no illusions about the “permanence” of my virtual exhibition. As we have read throughout the term, webpages come and go far more quickly than traditional print media. However, steps can be taken to ensure a longer-than-average lifespan for my project. First, I try to design all my pages to Web standards, and so their compliance with future browser applications is at least a possibility, if not a probability. Second, I can migrate my site to whichever educational institution to which my career carries me. Copies of all relevant images and files can be stored on CD to allow me to recreate the virtual exhibit when my time at George Mason University draws to a close.
It is not just the fleeting existence of the original show that argues for a digital project, though. In keeping with Janet Murray’s prayer to the computer, my site will “present text, images, and moving pictures valued by humanistic disciplines with a new precision of reference… By giving us greater control over different kinds of information, they invite us to tackle more complex tasks and to ask new kinds of questions.”1 The digital format allows me to present all forms of art censored by the Reichskammer, hopefully providing a synthesis that is more than just the sum of the parts.
Continue to the site’s tutorial, or proceed directly the the Exhibit Hall.