Playing with Originals

Painting of Victory of Samothrace (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All art has a single subject - and it's not beauty.


Why not embrace the originals, or at least their reproductions?

(Consider) the Relievo Collection, an odd package offered by the Van Gogh Museum to collectors and institutions who would like nine of van Gogh’s greatest hits on their walls, at a cool quarter-million dollars for the bunch, proving that even for the wealthiest people art can be difficult to procure and prohibitively expensive. These pricey reproductions are pinpoint accurate, made with sophisticated three-dimensional scanning and printing, so that every brushstroke is just as van Gogh made it. Only van Gogh did not make it. A printer did.

Welcome to what we might call “art in the age of digital reproduction.” This idea is riffing on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which he argued that authentic artworks have a certain, indefinable “aura” about them that makes them great. Reproductions—whether produced mechanically, as they were in 1936 when Benjamin was writing, or digitally as they are today—are missing this. We might even risk calling this the missing “soul” of the work—a key component that art lovers find lacking when they see a digital copy of a work.



A Quora question:

Is it cheesy or in poor taste to decorate your house with prints of famous paintings, replicas of famous sculptures, etc.? If so, why?

My choice of best answer:

The questions seems to ask us to pass judgement on how other people want to decorate their homes. It is indeed a very enjoyable pastime and commonly engaged in by the middle class, but I shall resist that temptation in favour of an answer that looks at how it can be done, while still attempting to answer the question. 

It can be done, but it is not easy to do it right. If you have a very elegant style, well done, your replica may suddenly look like "I could not afford the real thing". Ironically more of a problem to the affluent ones than those not.

Ways to pull it off could include doing something in a slightly ironic way (for students, put a party hat on the Socrates bust), or by changing the medium of the original. 

The latter may need some explanation. I mean that if you have a photo or a painting of Nike of Samothrace rather than a sculpture replica, it is then yet one step removed from the original and becomes, somehow, an object in its own right. If you really like Nike, chances are you will like a painting as much as a figurine, but the painting probably works better in terms of style and how others might react upon it.

Taking yet another step you could, for instance, "Warholify" the Mona Lisa, but now we are slowly moving towards turning you into a maker rather than a home decorator using ready-made pieces, so that may be over-advising. 

There is also what I would term "high kitsch". (Note high in there.) Better than being ironic, I think, at least in terms of emotional value, is to be playful. Take Nike, again, but now a figurine, and place her on a shelf on the wall where you have the text of Rilke's On "Archaic Torso of Apollo". Also on the shelf place a miniature guillotine... See where I am getting at? You are having fun, you are making some kind of statement, you also, incidentally, show yourself off to those in the know—using ready-made cheap plastic. 

It's not what you do. It's how you do it.