MUSING THE WORTHLESS

CLICK HERE TO GO TO SOURCE

Just as useful as the original ... Fake, copy, pastiche, forgery, reproduction. Many of the most bitter insults of the art world are designed to denigrate anything which is not the actual product of the master’s hand. People will make a special trip to Milan and stand in long queues to see the original Last Supper painted by Leonardo da Vinci himself. If that work was ever to come up for sale – which in itself would be considered an outrage – the sums involved would be utterly gigantic. The reproduction from a factory in the outskirts of Shenzhen, China, can be had for the price of a swanky new toaster. Its status is correspondingly very low indeed. If you had the original in your house, the most glamorous people in the world would want to be your friends. But if you display the copy, art world insiders will smirk and regard you as cultural low-life. We’ve uncritically absorbed the idea that copies are worthless ....CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE