When priceless pieces of art get stolen from the big galleries
in the major cultural centers of the world, people go crazy, the
media has a field day and prophets proclaim the ending of the
world, the four horsemen returning and Tom eating Jerry. But when
they make the announcement on the news, they have a digitally
rendered billion trillion pixel, perfect copy of the original sat
behind them. Why are the originals so valuable when everyone and
their dog can have the same picture printed off and wallpapered in
their downstairs too?
PhotographyMaybe before the invention of the camera and the
printing press, you could justify that a painting was something
valuable, as there would be no other way of recording that
priceless moment when an orange sat in the same bowl as an apple
and a banana. But with a photograph you can take a picture of a
painting or the scene itself, capturing its every minute detail.
Surely this should take some value from the original rendering.
ReplicasCriminals being criminals, they have delved into the art
world with reckless abandon and brought with them, art students,
jealous wannabe masters and copycats alike. Their skills can be
used to copy, stroke for stroke, old and new paintings so that
their version has every single quality that an original has. Surely
if you had no way of telling that this was in fact not the
original, then what happens to its value? It should go down
right?
Art is big business. There are millions and millions of
paintings out there. A hundred thousand million bowls of fruit, a
trillion half naked women, a great many old men on horses and a
rather large amount of blue squares next to red triangles. With new
artists streaming out of art colleges daily all with their own
thing to add to the art melting pot, why do some paintings demand
million pound price tags?
