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Vermeer & the Future of the Relationship Between Art & Technology
This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge
At Wonk Bridge, it’s our general belief that the most constructive way to adapt to living life in interesting times is for us to each be little Golden Age Dutch Republics of the mind — internal regimes in which the free play of new, perhaps ridiculous-seeming, even dangerous ideas is permitted in speculation free of the censorious instincts of received wisdom (in those days it was the Church, but the Church will always reside somewhere in Man, even if the man or woman in question is decidedly atheist).
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine any figure from that age — in which the markety metropoli of the Netherlands encouraged broadly liberal dispositions through free demographic mixing — feeling less at home in our time than one Johannes Vermeer. In our time of hyper-connectivity, travel mania, appetite for the instantaneous, this local, fastidiously minded Dutchman, who worked at such a deliberate pace, would’ve been a black swan. While millions of young adults now decamp each year for exotic landscapes in order to attempt to emulate the panoramic splendor of Dutch painting through and for the sake of the ‘gram (failing admirably, one and all), Vermeer never travelled beyond the Netherlands — and unlike Rembrandt, who didn’t travel either, he was not based…
