Seeing or hearing?

Gérôme was perfect, but few care to view his work these days. Once, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a would-be artist was aping Gérôme’s The Carpet Merchant, and the young imitator somehow upset his easel, which toppled onto Gérôme ’s painting, tearing its canvas. I worked at the museum then, and I remember that Gérôme’s original was quickly whisked off to the catacombs below for restoration. A momentary whirr of excitement about the mishap carried throughout the administrative offices and spilled into the galleries for a spell before it all settled down. I worked there for two years after that episode, and I cannot remember when the restored painting returned to the gallery. All I can recall is that one day, as I was walking the gallery beat, I noticed The Carpet Merchant hanging in its old space on the wall. And I remember wondering about how the return of the painting to its place had escaped my attention, especially as I was rather familiar with the stretch of galleries in the modern Western European wing of it all.
Why had such a furor over the damage to The Carpet Merchant risen and died as quickly as it had? I suspect that the museum staff simply ran a tight ship, and such an affront to any work of art would have been greeted with like thoroughness. I suppose that The Carpet Merchant hadn’t been considered much of a painting after all; it was in its near-exactitude of depiction a virtual photograph. And that’s part of the problem. When painters achieved a skill of depiction nearing verisimilitude, there was nowhere for painters to go, so they veered off into odd directions. And this is exactly what you saw.
What about music, which also began to see odd variations in form at about the same time? One can’t judge Schoenberg and Beethoven with the same ruler, after all. When perfection in music was achieved, what did it resemble? Gérôme painted a photograph, and so painters had to move sideways and yield to the photographers (at least for a time, as photography resembles verisimilitude less and less). Who is the Gérôme of music? Which musician achieved the precise depiction reality? Bach? Mozart? Anyone?
There was no objective reality there. It was impossible to attain because the possibilities of music were infinite. The visual arts regress or move sideways.
It seems to me that I would prefer to retain my hearing to my eyesight if presented with a choice between the two. Hearing simply offers a greater possibility of feeling, sensation, and profundity than sight, for all its obvious practical applications, can ever hope to supply.