Benedict Cumberbatch raised a fascinating, even philosophical, question when he begged fans not to corrupt a night out at the theatre by filming his performance of Hamlet. Standing at the stage door he mused on the destruction of memory and experience in the digital age, pleading with people not to ruin the moment but instead pay attention to “a live performance that you’ll remember, hopefully, in your minds and brains whether it’s good, bad or indifferent, rather than on your phones”.
His heartfelt protest against the abuse of technology will strike a chord with anyone who has felt baffled by today’s urge to photograph and film heightened cultural experiences as they happen, in a way that surely spoils the point of them. It certainly struck a chord with me.
Cameras and cameraphones (is there any other kind of phone nowadays?) are the curse of the 21st-century museum. At any museum that allows photography you will see some visitors simply going around snapping one painting after another apparently without stopping to look at the work. Just taking a picture seems to satisfy them. What’s the attraction? Why would anyone do that? You can get postcards and guidebooks if you want a record. I feel like shaking them. Stop and look, dammit! Cumberbatch has put it very well: a work of art, whether it is a painting or a play, should live in our minds, not on our phones.
Ah, how delicious it is to take the high cultural ground and condemn contemporary habits. Now I can retreat to my ivory tower and watch Sherlock, in a version specially edited by Cumberbatch with all the snazzy tech references to mobile phones and Watson’s blog removed. Or I could go to the Proms and enjoy some high musical art. I recently went to a Prom starring the Aurora Orchestra. At the start of the concert an announcement rang through the Albert Hall instructing – I think that was the tone, instructing – the audience not to film or photograph the concert. Quite right!
But wait. What was that long robotic boom that kept elegantly moving about over the orchestra’s heads, as if dancing? And that other device that was sliding along the front of the stage? Cameras! Someone had not merely sneaked out a phone but set up a whole battery of sophisticated cameras and recording equipment all around the stage. A week or so later they put out the footage – and not on YouTube but the actual BBC!
For it’s wrong, apparently, to record cultural events for ourselves but absolutely great when it is done officially by a broadcaster. The Proms, surely, can be accused of everything that curmudgeons such as Benedict and I accuse gallery snappers and secret theatre filmers of doing. If it is truly damaging to cultural experience to record it, surely it must be equally destructive when done by professionals.
It is not, of course, and there’s food for thought there, Horatio. I think we snobs may be underestimating the power of art. Live performance has a texture and excitement that is not “spoiled” by its translation into recorded images. The Aurora Orchestra’s excellent gig culminated in a brilliantly spontaneous-seeming performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in which the orchestra stood instead of sitting and performed from memory without scores to look at. It felt like anything could happen. A baby cried. A fizzy water bottle opened (that was me). But the orchestra played on and the turbulent grandeur of Beethoven’s soul seeped into every nook and cranny of the Albert Hall.
It was utterly gripping but challenging, too, as great art is. How superb then to be able to experience it again, close up on screen, and listen once more to the subtleties of the orchestra.
For recording of all kinds, including by today’s revolutionary personal tech, does not wreck our experience of the arts – it enriches it. Live performance has not vanished since the invention of the gramophone. Rather, the chance to experience performances in the cool of a recording as well as the heat of live encounter enables us to comprehend them better. Theatre – above all Shakespeare – has been utterly transformed by film and television. It is almost impossible to imagine what it was like seeing Hamlet when it was first performed in about 1600 to audiences who had no script to consult, let alone videos to familiarise themselves with this stupendously intelligent human artefact.
Indeed the fame of Shakespeare in the modern age is proof the German Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin was wrong in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin argued in this 1936 essay that photography, cinema and other modern forms of reproduction would destroy the “aura” of the original work of art, unseating the masterpieces revered by the ruling class. In fact the opposite has happened. Mechanical reproduction hugely increases the aura of works of art. The more people see Shakespeare on screen in terrific films such as the BBC’s Hollow Crown series, the more they want to see the plays live. The more we see Cumberbatch on telly, the more we want to see him at the Barbican.
The truth – hard is it may be to accept when you see those apparently idiotic camera buffs doing their stuff – is that the omnipresence of personal photography and filming at cultural events is just a continuation of the dialectic between moment and memory that has shaped and overwhelmingly enhanced our experience of the arts ever since actors in Victorian costumes pranced about in the first silent films of Shakespeare.
The era of reproduction did not unseat oil paintings from art galleries either, as Benjamin predicted it would. The Mona Lisa holds court in the Louvre. She smiles on while cameraphones are raised to do her reverence. It makes me shudder that people just seem to want to take her picture but actually, they have come, some of them, thousands of miles to do so. In the blaze of our cameras lurks a paradox. It seems we are forgetting to experience art in our minds but actually the camera is just an aid to seeing or watching again. What looks like barbarism is keeping civilisation alive. Aye, Benedict, there’s the rub.
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