Avatar Inspiration? “Vishnu” and “Split Second” at the Brooklyn Museum

Anybody wondering what inspired James Cameron to create the 3-D movie “Avatar” might have a eureka moment within seconds after visiting the exhibition at the , “Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior.” Vishnu, one of the three main deities of the Hindu religion, is said to take on various temporary bodies when visiting earth, and in Hinduism these are called avatars. All the avatars have blue skin.

Vishnu’s avatars have names like Narasimha and Matsya; James Cameron’s “Avatar” has blue-skinned characters named Neytiri, Mo’at and Tsu’tey.

Yes, says Joan Cummins, the curator of the Vishnu exhibition, she can see how James Cameron might have drawn some of his ideas from Hinduism. “But he went a very long way away from it,” she said.

Still, the largest-grossing film of all time has no monopoly on mixing the ancient with the cutting-edge, the traditional with the technological. There are examples connected to the two new exhibitions of art from India at the Brooklyn Museum.

The Vishnu exhibition features sculptures and paintings and ritual objects connected in one way or another to the Hindu god that has inspired more art than any of the others – some 170 works of art in the exhibition, mostly borrowed from other collections, date back as early as the 4th century. But spread among the art objects are also about a dozen iPads dating back to last year. On the screen of each is “Vishnu’s Avatars.” When you touch the screen, you see cartoon versions of 10 blue-skinned avatars.  Select one of them to touch, and the screen then presents an image of a work of art. (The real work of art is right next to the screen). The aim of the game is to find the representation of the specific avatar you selected in the work of art.

“We were afraid that people would look at the iPads more than any of the works of art,” Cummins joked.

Do they?  Shelley Bernstein, the Brooklyn Museum’s chief of technology, was intrigued by a question confronting any museum-goer: “In a room full of many objects, what do you choose to look at?” To begin to find answers to that question, she devised an unusual project, which has led to a companion exhibition about Indian art, “Split Second,” opening July 13.

It began, as do many of her projects, online, and involved 167 works of art from India taken from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection. Over a 10-week period beginning in February, the museum’s website asked visitors to give a series of ratings. First, in something of a nod to the Facemash game that gets Mark Zuckerberg in trouble at the beginning of “The Social Network,” paintings were presented two at a time; the visitor had four seconds to choose which of the pair was more “intriguing.” The visitors then described painting in their own words, and judged them in various other ways.

Response was impressive:  4,617 people from 17 countries, but mostly Brooklyn, provided some 176,000 ratings. And then Bernstein did what she likes best: She crunched the numbers. For the exhibition, she picked 11 works of art that represented some of the most interesting findings.  A painting with the complicated title “Amr, Disguised as Mazmahil the Surgeon, Practices Quackery on the Sorcerers of Antali” – crowded with color, people, and patterns – illustrates Bernstein’s most surprising finding: Complex paintings got higher ratings than simple paintings. Less surprising, paintings with explanatory wall labels always got higher ratings than paintings without labels.

One painting got the highest ratings across the board: "Krishna and Radha under a Tree in a Storm," painted using watercolor and gold sometime around 1800.

It is not clear why this particular painting pleased so many people, nor whether the data from “Split Second” can lead to any definitive conclusions about the way people in the 21st century look at art, and the world.  But one need not know how to use a spreadsheet (or an iPad, for that matter) to realize our ways of looking at things have evolved, not necessarily for the better.

“We have much shorter attention spans than we did,” Cummins says. “The only full-color images you could get were paintings. Paintings were a special experience. A lot of people never saw pictures at all unless they drew them themselves in the dirt or on the wall. The temples were the only place where they could see great art. We tend to be a lot more blasé about art,” she said.

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