Practice question · Multiple choice
Reproductions flatten scale, so a miniature and an altarpiece look the same size on a screen. Why does that matter for art history specifically?
Hints
- Ask what a viewer standing before a five-metre altarpiece experiences that a screen cannot supply.
- The discipline's central method compares reproductions.
Show the answer
B. Scale is part of how a work addresses its viewer, and the comparative method silently discards it
Why
Because scale is part of the work's address. An altarpiece that fills your field of view and a miniature held in the hand ask for entirely different attention, and the comparative method, the discipline's central technique, puts them side by side at the same size without announcing what it has removed.
Practise Photography and Mass Media
The app has 6 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Photography and Mass Media
- Which are true of a photograph's indexical character?
- Photographs possess evidential authority because they are indexical traces, yet they frequently mislead. Why…
- Sort each consequence by whether Benjamin treats it as EMANCIPATORY or DANGEROUS.
- In roughly which year did Benjamin write "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"?
- Arrange the steps of Benjamin's argument in order.
- Arrange these developments in the reproduction of images in order.