The Sunday Edit | Make A Fake: The Effect of 3D Reproductions on the Value of Original Art
Scanning Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride at the Rijksmuseum Source: www.designboom.com
You will likely value your favorite possessions because…
1. You like them
2. They are hand-made or hand-crafted
3. They are historically important (to you and/or others)
4. They are original and unique.
The Mona Lisa in the Louvre, Paris. Source: Discover Walks Blog
The actual brushstrokes, the paint, the dovetails, the woodgrain, the applied glaze, the movement, the meaning. There is only one. It almost always begins its life admired in a private home. Later, perhaps, it lives in a public institution, admired by many. In either case, the invisible aura of authenticity is important.
How do some people sell their beloved masterpieces at auction? They have, in many cases, lived with these objects or paintings for decades, grown to love them dearly, and are parting with them only with the greatest reluctance. Let’s focus on the artwork here.
Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, 1486. There are tall trees on the right side of the real moving painting. The fake is missing the trees. Source: How To Tell Fake Art From Real Art In New Horizons
FAKE-A-PAINT
There’s a simple way to have your (painted) cake and eat it too. Before you sell the work: you document it photographically, and you get a very accurate reproduction made, which looks to all intents and purposes identical, and hang it in the same place that the original had been.
Paul Klee, Red Balloon, 1922. The painting demonstrates Klee’s capacity to draw inspiration from many different art styles, in particular showing his mastery of color theory. Source: Singulart
Aesthetically, one's life pleasure is reduced by only the most minuscule amount, if at all. Financially, one can have a nice payday. But few folks do that. Even fakes can acquire an aura: one collector had a beautiful Paul Klee drawing by her bedside, and learned after many years that it was a fake. It stayed by her bedside, as beloved as ever (if not nearly as valuable).
Oce Group’s high-resolution 3D printer generates precise duplications of the digital image, paralleling every minute detail, including tactual characteristics like the coarse build-up of brush stroke motions.
The point is that so long as authenticity can be determined somehow, the value of an original unique artwork will always be greater than the value of its copy. It doesn’t matter if you can tell the difference; the value lies in the authenticity, not in the aesthetics of the piece. That said, advances in reproduction technology have changed what artists do, in profound and interesting ways.
Art work by DALL-E 2 / Courtesy OpenAI
Consider the advent of 3-D printing. There is a certain fascination around the subject of a computer imitating the human hand and creating a nearly indistinguishable copy. A fusion of science and art, 3-D modeling allows us to see artwork from a new perspective as we watch a computer engage in the "creative process."
Today, as we adjust to an AI World, Art will be in in! For a future Sunday…
-Authored by Lynn Magnusson, President; edited by Heather Zises, Marketing Director
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