Reproductions vs Originals

Fellow appraiser Susan McDonough, AAA sent me an interesting post from Reuters on 3-D reproductions of fine art and the value of authenticate and original art vs the values of reproductions and fakes. The article looks at the increasing number of fakes and reproductions being produced, and concludes that these copies and duplicates may in fact increase the interest and the value in original pieces.

Years ago the attitude of copies and reproductions was probably much different but with changes in scholarship, technology, printing processes, access to information and images through the internet, as well as the whole idea of sharing content through the internet outlooks on copies evolve.

The article is well worth take a couple of minutes to read in its entirety.

Reuters reports

When paintings become worth millions of dollars, it’s not because of some intrinsic aesthetic value. If it was, then known fakes would be valuable, rather than worthless, and outfits like Artisoo would be serious operations, rather than laughingstocks. We value certain objects because they are handmade; because of whose hand made them; and because they are historically important. This is the unique actual painting that Vincent Van Gogh painted in a certain month in 1890, these are his actual brushstrokes, his actual paint; this is a key part of the oeuvre which changed the course of (art) history. There is only one of this painting, it exists in a certain museum, and if you want, you can do the pilgrimage: get on a plane, and fly to Amsterdam, and visit the museum. Kaminska sneers at “sacred relics”, but the financial and sociological and art historical value in these paintings makes them much closer to being sacred relics than they are to being purely decorative works, admired just for what they look like.

The invisible aura of authenticity is of paramount importance. Look at the people who sell their beloved masterpieces at auction — they have in many cases lived with these paintings for decades, grown to love them dearly, and are parting with them only with the greatest reluctance. There’s a simple way to have your cake and eat it, in that situation: before you sell the work, 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. Aesthetically, your life is reduced by only the most minuscule amount, if at all; financially, you make millions. But no one does that.

Even fakes can acquire an aura: one collector I know 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). But again, if it had been stolen, she would not have replaced it with a reproduction, or some fake fake.

The point is that so long as authenticity can be determined somehow, the value of an original unique artwork will always be orders of magnitude greater than the value of any 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. I don’t have formal statistics on this, but I would guess that a significant majority of the contemporary art sold at high-end galleries is editioned. This makes perfect sense: if you can create three pieces, or five, then that gives you the opportunity to sell the same piece three or five times over. Wonderfully, in the case of small editions like that, the price doesn’t even go down: collectors like buying an edition of three or five, especially if one of the other pieces in the edition ends up in a respected museum.

Source: Reuters