Digital Object · IS 310
The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh, 1889. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
What this object represents
According to the MoMA website, Van Gogh painted this in June 1889 while staying at an asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. He could see the hills and cypress tree from his window. He added the village from memory. People often read the swirling sky as a reflection of his state of mind at the time.
This painting matters to a project about digitized visual art because it shows the gap between an artwork and its digital surrogate. A JPEG of The Starry Night can reproduce the composition and colors. Studying how museums like MoMA choose to photograph, crop, and caption a painting for the web is itself a way of asking what gets preserved and what gets lost when a physical object becomes cultural data.