Leseprobe

160 changes in personnel, equipment, and scale as it diffuses across newmedia festivals, exhi- bitions, andWeb sites. Like a shark, a newmedia artworkmust keepmoving to survive.’ 18 In the subsequent passages, Ippolito examines each of the constituent data of object labels in turn. I shall describe here only a few examples. Firstly, re-creators who may be obliged to adapt software or re-install works in exhibition spaces and thus make conse- quential decisions, are often not named at all. Secondly, in the development of media art works throughout successive festivals and exhibitions, changes are often made to titles, but objects’ biographies are not traceable because older titles are normally not included in the information on labels. Thirdly, given the phenomenon of media obsolescence, it is impossible to fix thematerial andmedia of a piece to one specification. 19 In short, Ippolito saw in the wall label the model and the metaphor of a static attitude and a reductionism which is in dire need of reform, because of its falsifying nature. To go even further, he claims that his observations are applicable not only to media art, but to installation art in general and at least in part also to pieces of performance and process art. Moreover, in museum jargon, the exhibit label is commonly referred to as ‘tombstone.’ While Ippolito does not address this peculiarity, it seems that in his view, the label can be said to accom- plish its task. The extent to which alterations to object labels are representative of a status loss is seenmost distinctly in adjustments of ascriptions that are discovered to be incorrect. This kind of ‘death by wall label’ is perhaps the most feared in museums—the object is not what it pretends to be. It is an imposter that has sneakily intruded on our attention and deceived us into granting it our admiration. In other words, the experts have failed us with an incorrect statement—the Emperor is not wearing any clothes!—and the authorities are exposed along with the object. One example of a long-postponed label adjustment is the bust of Flora kept in Berlin, which Wilhelm Bode attributed to Leonardo. Indeed, soon after Bode purchased the sculpture in 1909 for the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin (today the Bode-Museum) as a hitherto undiscovered masterpiece, some claimed that the piece was in fact not a Leon- ardo, but a work by the British nineteenth-century sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas. How- ever, against all critical voices, Bode stood by his initial ascription, claiming that the bust had been heavily restored in the nineteenth century and thus made the conflict one of the most long-lasting ascription and dating debates in art history. 20 Indeed, the provenance and age of the piece remained contested long after this initial challenge partly because of 18  Ippolito, ‘Death byWall Label,’ 2008, p. 106.  19 As additional possibilities to be considered in the case of media art, he names the year of conception, of the first implementation, of a refabrication, or later variations. See: Ippolito, ‘Death by Wall Label,’ 2008, p. 114.  20 Up until the mid-1930s alone, more than 700 articles on the subject had been published. The entire history is thoroughly traced inWolff-Thomsen, Die Wachsbüste einer Flora , 2006. See: Kobi (ed.), The Limits of Connoisseurship , 2017.  21  I thank Dario Gamboni for pointing this out.  22 Geimer, ‘Das falsche Original,’ 2010, pp. 23 –39, here p. 23.  23 Van de Wetering, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings VI , 2014.  24 See Geimer, ‘Das falsche Original,’ 2010, p. 36.