Are Replicas Changing the Way We Experience Art?

Precise digital reproductions allow more people to own and view masterpieces—minus the work’s soul.

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You are in the Chauvet cave, 35,000 years old. As you enter, the walkway you traverse winds around spot-lit, saber-toothed stalactites and stalagmites. The rough-skin texture of the stone walls is slick in the perpetually damp dark. Your flashlight picks out first one, then more prehistoric paintings on the wall. A deer, bison, a rhinoceros, all painted in charcoal black by Paleolithic hands. Or were they?

Something is missing, even a blind person could tell that. The scent is all wrong. Instead of damp mustiness, it smells of, well, tourists. You are not in the real Chauvet cave, which is closed to the public, as the atmospheric conditions that preserve its fragile paintings must be maintained. Instead, you are in the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, a recently opened replica of the Chauvet cave. It’s accurate down to the last undulation of the stone wall—to the last stalactite—but patently false.

Now, you travel blindfolded to some anonymous, freshly built art museum. Down goes the blindfold, and you stand before Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom. Surely you must be in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Why, the painting is obviously a Van Gogh, with the artist’s globular, three-dimensional application of vast, snotty quantities of oil, so much that the paint casts a shadow.

But no, you’re looking at a work from 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 pricy 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.

I specify digital copy, because these reproductions are very different from forgeries. In my recent book, I discussed whether a forgery of a great work of art could itself be considered great. Most forgeries that make any headway in fooling experts are unique works themselves, made by hand by an artist in fraudulent imitation of the work of some other, more famous artist. These forgeries are “originals,” in that they are still created by a passionate craftsman, and therefore possess their own kind of aura. They are just made in a derivative style and then later passed off as something they are not.

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