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The Musicalisation of
Visual Arts

ANTOINE HENNION
translated and introduced by Jérôme Hansen

This article was first published in Images Numériques: L’aventure du regard,

1997, O. Blin et J. Sauvageot (eds.), University Press of Rennes/Distique, pp.
147–151. Reproduced courtesy of the publishers.

The work of French sociologist Antoine Hennion, along with that of other
authors such as Tia DeNora (2003), represents the latest attempt to conceptu-
alise the relation between society and works of art, or rather the work of art in
society, without resorting to the kind of purely internalist readings favoured by
aestheticians nor, in reverse, burying their material specificities under the weight
of social determinants. In this dense but beautifully composed article (two fitting
qualifiers for the topic of image processing), the reader will find two key terms
in Hennion’s analytical toolkit, namely mediation and amateurs, mobilised in a
reflection on the changes brought about by the digital reordering of artistic
practices (for a comprehensive summary of Hennion’s sociological approach, see
Looseley 2006). Needless to say, the media ecology of which the author speaks
has gone through substantial changes since the article’s first publication in French
more than ten years ago. Using Hennion’s example of the now residual tech-
nology of the CD-ROM, we could sum up this socio-technical evolution as having
moved from a ‘read-only’ model to what has come to be known as a ‘remix’
culture, characterised by a ‘relayed creativity’ (Born 2005) in which the respec-
tive roles of producers and audiences are redistributed and the material status
of the resulting work is more fluid than ever. Although Hennion’s idea of ‘musi-
calisation’ shares many features with the equally musical trope of the remix –
now prevalent in so many cultural spheres, from open-source software to
footwear – his historical cross-analysis of music and the visual arts should remind
us that the regimes of art result from complex and contingent mediation effects,
through which possibilities for greater openness and performativity coexist with
the more established processes of authoriality and stabilisation. Facilitated by
new media technologies (laptop, internet, editing software, etc.), the emergent
cultural forms such as audio mash-ups, fan videos, live soundtracking, VJing and
the like, largely confirm the role of ‘amateur instrumentalists’ in our audiovisual
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culture. By pointing in the direction of this creative force, and away from the
isolated works presented to us in museums, galleries and other institutional art
spaces, Hennion’s contribution should be taken as an invitation to investigate
further the objects, procedures and collectives that are simultaneously
constructing and constructed through new regimes of digital creativity.

Suggested Readings
Born, G. (2005) ‘On Musical Mediations: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’, Twentieth-
century Music, 2(1), pp. 7–36
DeNora, T. (2003) After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Hennion, A. (2007) ‘Those Things that Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology’, Cultural
Sociology, 1(1), pp. 97–114
Looseley, D. (2006) ‘Intellectuals and Cultural Policy in France: Antoine Hennion and the
Sociology of Music’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 12(3), pp. 343–54

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Beyond the oscillation between naïve enthusiasm and conservative scep-

ticism that inevitably greets the introduction of new technologies, it is
possible – and perhaps even necessary – to draw a few insights from their
recent dramatic proliferation in the realm of image and sound.
First, it must be noted that it is the fundamental characteristics of the
visual arts, once easily taken for granted, that have been affected by
digital media technologies. Indeed, if the virtual image conjures up a
sense of loss, or absence, it is not that of the real ‘body’ of the represented
subject – be it the flesh of the model or the reality of a chosen landscape
– but of the very texture of the picture and the stability of its support.
What we see is truly a change of medium, as expressed in the change of
vocabulary from painting and visual arts to images and their processing
– a painting cannot be ‘processed’ (at best, it can be restored). The model
suggested by the uses of computer technologies constitutes a mirror-
image of the model historically constructed by the evolution of painting:

• The painter produces a fixed image, attributed to a single author,

created on a given medium (or, in the case of sculpture, equivalent to
this medium), and whose distinct occurrence is guaranteed by the
indivisible link between the ‘matter’ of the painting and the image it
reflects. This is what Goodman (1968) called the autographic nature of
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painting, in contrast with the allographic arts that require ‘notation’,

as for music or literature. The same logic pertains to the powerful
metonymy that allows us to speak of ‘painting’ as an art form, whereas
‘sound’ cannot stand for music, nor ‘words’ for poetry.
• By contrast, digital images are mobile: they can be manipulated, multi-
plied, and identically duplicated; they can travel beyond their initial
support, replicated in many different ways on to many different
supports. On the legal-economic level (as demonstrated by the
conflicts over copyrights that soon ensued), the resulting changes in
status are equally significant: the once-clear distinctions between
original and copy, or between creator and viewer, have been muddled,
unless artificially reinstated (which is what art photography and lithog-
raphy were attempting, long before the digital era, by numbering and
1 See Moulin (1978). rarefying their prints).1 In the same way, only artificial means of
protection can make their appropriation possible – the fact that, if I
own it, you don’t. If I buy the Louvre CD-ROM, I’m not preventing
anyone from getting another ‘copy’, just as other music lovers can still
enjoy the St Matthew Passion after I have bought ‘it’ (a common misuse
of language to speak of one of its reproductions on a CD; and a lucky
misuse, without which the sentence could imply the same financial
transaction as when buying ‘a’ Picasso…).

Performing the Image?

At this stage, we could merely be talking of another mode of diffusion, a
means of identically reproducing stable works. This, however, is far from
the case. As soon as the production of an image here, in front of me,
requires a set of operations equivalent to those mobilised by its creator,
the ‘viewer’ (one can feel how inadequate the term is for digital media)
effectively co-produces the image. Even when the original material
apparently remains the same, as in the case of a classic painting on a CD-
ROM, what the new term ‘processing’ conveys very well is the need for a
visual counterpart to the musical act of interpretation, whereas previ-
ously this stage was not only useless but impossible. I couldn’t possibly see
‘the’ Mona Lisa on my computer, but only a ‘version’ of this image as
displayed through my current set of tools, through the particular
software that enables me to read it, determined by their distinct
sequencing and interactive capabilities, by the features of my computer
screen (size, resolution, brightness), etc. Following the logic of this new-
found opacity of transmission itself, we should add to that the choices
made on my behalf by the professional encoders who have already
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‘interpreted’ this image, at least potentially in relation to the processing

it can undergo once it is in my hands. Image processing will soon have
its own amateurs. It will become far less relevant to speak of images as we
did of paintings than as works to be ‘performed’, and we will be left
wondering whether what we are looking at is a reproduction, a version,
a copy, or an interpretation of the Mona Lisa.2 Once again, the neat 2 Cf. the virtuoso

distinction that used to separate the arts has been blurred: stripped of its analysis of Genette
following Goodman’s
allographic character, the image becomes musicalised… original categorisation,
But this ontological direction is not the one that I would like to embark in the chapter ‘The
Allographic Régime’,
upon in this brief examination of new artistic practices. Following the (1997: 73–81)
role of mediation, made all the more visible as the work changes, I want
to come back instead to the ‘social construction’ of arts and their rela-
tionship with an audience. As well as contributing to the formation of
new arts, the parallel movements in the digitisation of the basic compo-
nents of both sound and image also give us the possibility to better appre-
ciate the status of earlier forms and re-examine how they relate to each
other. The mobility and ‘passings’3 introduced by the recent possibilities 3 Translator’s note: on
for processing sound and image together provide a valuable point of the various levels of
‘passings’ in amateur
departure for looking back at the cross-evolution of music and the visual practices, see Gomart &
arts, and their respective paths towards the development of increasingly Hennion (1999).
sophisticated techniques for stabilising their objects.4 4 Cf. Hennion (2007
[1993])

The Pas de Deux of Music and Visual Arts

Music holds a paradoxical, unstable position with regard to the question
of mediation: its objects are dynamic, elusive, always in need of interpre-
tation. This should prevent the study of musical productions from
limiting itself to those material traces that, unlike in the visual arts, never
amount to the work itself. That being said, the history of music has long
involved the mobilisation of material intermediaries so that it too could
aspire to the status of an autonomous reality, becoming a little more
object and a little less mediation, and producing closed works and
authors akin to those in literature, whilst also attracting a solvent public:
all this thanks mainly to music’s transformation into written form. The
history of music is not that of an art of sound counterbalancing the
evolution of the visual arts, but more accurately, the story of a continuing
effort on the part of musicians to make their art more visual and stable,
no longer that ‘unfortunate’ art which has to ‘die as soon as it is born’, as
Leonardo da Vinci described it in his Treatise on Painting.5 The same effort 5 Cited in Benjamin

was at stake in the struggle waged by composers to restrain the liberties (1969: 249)

taken by interpreters of their creations. As Couperin once instructed: ‘I

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declare that my pieces ought to be played as I have marked them… to

the letter…, without adding or subtracting anything.’ And likewise with
Ravel, who put it more crudely by saying he favoured well-rehearsed
conductors over those who have genius.
Understood in this context, musicians were certainly far more
prepared for the emergence of computer technologies than visual artists.
They are familiar with the distinction between, on the one hand, the
notation, fixation and transmission of the work through time and, on the
other, its present instantiation. The continuous development of
recording technologies – from score to magnetic tape, discs, through to
the new digital forms – has made musicians all the more attuned to the
opposition between the logic that pertains to the means of preserving
‘dead’ sounds and the specificities of a public performance that makes
use of these traces, objects and media to bring music back to life. In the
case of image processing, the fact that these new technologies touch on
the very materials used by visual artists has left an impression of radical
break (as well as opening up new creative possibilities and career paths).
In the case of music, however, the same tools were more naturally inte-
grated, appearing to an extent as the logical culmination of a long
process of fixation. What then can be said from the perspective of music
about this sudden return of ‘performance’ in the domain of visual
contemplation – the resurgent condition of having to re-create an image
in order to access it, of making something else, alive and perceptible, out
of the traces left by a dead, invisible object?
Beyond its crucial technical aspects, this gap between stable objects and
provisional, open-ended instantiations (a valid distinction for music, but
irrelevant for a classic painting) also engages the relationship between art
works and their amateurs, and as such constitutes a valuable historical
indicator. This question calls for a shift of attention towards the intensive
social work required for such basic notions as author, individual work of
art, and audience to emerge out of a conflicting (real or mythical) model,
where art is understood as a communal and instantaneous practice:
moments of creation and consumption dissolve in the fervour of the
collective, and no clear distinction exists between the physical presence of
objects and their mobilisation in the situated moment of performance.
At this point, the usefulness of a historical comparison between the arts
should appear more clearly. Rather than take the permanence and
immediate presence of the painting as the result of its immutable physical
property, an inherent feature of the visual medium (and, by extension, to
perceive the new digital possibilities in terms of a revolution that will free
the image from its initial material-anthropological properties), this
method proposes an alternative: the image’s fixed character, far from
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being natural, is effectively the result of a long social process of produc-

tion of the notion of artwork, in parallel with the concept of the author.6 6 See Foucault (2000
[1969]).
This process, which originated in literature, is now common to both
painting and music, and what the differences in media and forms of pres-
entation between these two art forms underscore is not some age-old
antagonism between the visual and the auditory, but the complexity and
variety of historical operations necessary to the constitution of any art.
Reciprocally, the same comparison also re-establishes the connection
between physical and virtual (or more simply digital) images: it has
already been more than a century since the plastic arts, informed by
increasingly radical critiques of the notion of work, have departed from
the marble-like durability of their statues. They did not have to wait for
digital media to turn their works into various modalities of performance
– happenings, ephemeral objects, wrapping of buildings, and other
conceptual acts.
As well as emphasising the role of art’s technical mediations and their
effects on the status of the resulting object, this contextualisation reveals
evocative paradoxes. Now seen as part of the internal movement of
artistic autonomy and the modern concerns over its relationship with the
public, the recourse to digital media seems (at least at first glance) to have
taken completely different directions depending whether we look at
music or the contemporary visual arts. In the former, it looks as if the
eternal quest for its object has made music all the more eager to incor-
porate the technologies of sound recording and processing that would
provide its practitioners with a degree of manipulation so far only acces-
sible to visual artists. Here was finally an occasion for them to bypass
interpretation and directly produce works in a definitive form,
completely independent from its successive manifestations in space and
time. But while music, more explicitly in its electro-acoustic form, discov-
ered that it could be an object, visual artists were using the same tech-
nologies for the exact opposite purpose: withdrawing from the terrorism
of the immutable work, making it more open, mobile, endlessly appro-
priable and inevitably interpretable – they were ‘musicalising’ their
approach to the work!
Beyond the issue of the status of objects and works, our interrogation
now shifts to the mediation operated by the techniques linking creators
and their audiences, an effect made more apparent through the historical
pas de deux through which music and the visual arts became modern arts,
that is to say, when they both entered a regime of production and
reception of unique works, credited to individual authors.
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From Viewers to Amateur Instrumentalists

To conclude this admittedly far too allusive reflection, I would like to
examine the consequences that this parallel evolution has had on a new
form of participation for the ‘audience’ of images, now transformed into
amateur instrumentalists. Without a doubt, the new technologies of
information have had a most radical effect on the institutional construc-
tion of the love of art. Despite their apparent enthusiasm, perhaps to be
taken as a survival reflex, museums are far from appropriate for the
screened image. Now, their role should be to act as ‘workshops’, to
imitate the classroom or even the local Apple store! In many ways, the
traditional museum represented the paradigmatic form for the modern
conception of the work of art: an over-localised showcase for displaying
original pieces, documented, framed and set in relation to each other as
part of a collection, presented through their creators – themselves caught
in the same process of ‘authority’ – and put on display under heavily
constructed frames of public appreciation. Far from being opposed to
this source point of the original work, but rather responding to it in
counterpoint, we find the sum of all the industrial reproductions that it
makes possible – a variety of ‘copies’ ranging from the exhibition
catalogue to the thousands of pictures aimed at mass circulation and the
countless different uses that can be made of famous art works: decora-
7 Cf. Hennion (1997) tive, illustrative, expressive, promotional, ironic, and so on.7
The ‘performative’ model that music established for itself stands in
sharp contrast with this general system of production of differentiated
originals and copies (which of course does not mean that music cannot
still envy certain aspects of its rival model: the ‘art market’, for example,
is still out of music’s reach in its contemporary form, as are collections
and museums). Whereas in the first model, centred on the object-work,
we find a maximum tension between the source point of the original
work and the diffused network of its copies, the second, centred on the
performance-work, relies on the dissemination of a multitude of devices
meant to re-produce an event, to produce it afresh. Users of digital
images should not look in the direction of museums and galleries for
models, but towards concerts and records, the music schools where one
learns both instruments and music theory, the basements where hip-hop
and rock bands practise, or the living rooms of amateur musicians and
audiophiles. For it is there, by looking at the musicians’ codes and ways
of doing, the role of amateur groups, or the spontaneous ways through
which they learn to use their tools, that new users will find the inspira-
tion to define their new forms of practice and dissemination, and to
redefine the role of traditional art lovers, shake them out of their
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contemplation, and give them back the means to actively perform their
own aesthetic jouissance. Meanwhile, musicians (or at least some of them)
can choose to retreat into ‘studio-laboratories’, mimicking the scientific
model, as if with computers they had at last found (two centuries after
painters) a way to produce music without the need for a public!
After all, there surely must be some hidden justice to explain why the
same instrument – the computer – should bring music into the museum
and away from its amateurs, while simultaneously taking visual arts out
of the museum and back into the hands of amateur instrumentalists…

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

References
Benjamin, W. (1969) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
in Illuminations, New York: Schocken
Foucault, M. (2000 [1969]) ‘What is an Author?’ in J. D. Faubion (ed.) Essential
Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Vol. 2, London: Penguin, pp. 205–22
Genette, G. (1997) The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press
Gomart, E. and Hennion, A (1999) ‘A Sociology of Attachment: Music
Amateurs, Drug Users’ in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds.) Actor Network Theory
and After, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 220–47
Goodman, N. (1968) Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols,
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill
Hennion, A. (1997) ‘Hercule et Bach: La production de l’original’, Revue
Française de Musicologie, 83(2), pp. 93–121
— (2007 [1993]) La Passion Musicale: Une Sociologie de la Médiation, Paris,
Métailié
Moulin, R. (1978) ‘La genèse de la rareté artistique’, Ethnologie Française, 8(2/3),
pp. 241–58