Over a decade ago, the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum organized an exhibition, presenting works of Rembrandt and Caravaggio side by side. Some of the most important paintings from the greatest museums in the world were on display. It was a wonderful juxtaposition of these two Baroque artists.
Unfortunately, the exhibition only lasted a few months in 2006 and, with time travel apparently being impossible, will forever remain in 2006.
Unless of course, we are willing to make do with a synthetic version, one recreated with modern web technologies.
with some good friends about Caravaggio and Rembrandt and recalled the exposition in 2006. If only, I said, we could all go there and continue our chat while walking around.
Later that evening I has the realization that we could. If one could reconstruct the exposition on a website or in VR, the exposition could be a permanent one.
and to my delight, was soon downloading a collection of 60 images that, with time and effort, could form the basis for reconstruction. I registered this domain, rexhibition.com to host the exhibition. If this works and finds appreciation, then I can think of a number of exhibitions that can benefit from being resuscitated in similar fashion!
That I missed for various, sometimes bad reasons...
and that I would love to see again. Perhaps having more time and less crowds. Some that I think you'd like to see as well. There will be numerous ones that you'd like me and others to see!
I wish I had more time. There's a family and a business to tend to. And so, rExhibition needs time.
I wish I had more money. It is not the source of all evil when you can hand it to others to help realize this vision.
It won't be difficult to think of exhibitions to resurrect. But getting to all the art, the copy and potentially securing the rights? Now that's a chore.
So what rExhibition really needs is people and resources. It needs to become a team, a foundation with tax exempt status. It needs a couple of people willing to reconstruct exhibitions, maintain contacts, promote the site and gather source materials. It needs people willing to build web pages in reconstruction of the original exhibition. And it also needs people capable of using the latest 3d web techniques such as threejs and aframe.io to reconstruct the actual space in VR. With such a team in place, some of art's lost treasures: the unique exhibitions themselves, can be revived.
