https://shop.verusart.com/pages/vincent-van-gogh-collection
The only reason this is not more widely available is due to snobbery and elitism in the fine art world, IMO. Imagine a world in which there were only a single copy of every work of Beethoven.
Never went ahead with the idea but I assume (I am not a painter) that modern high quality oils would allow a reasonably talented artist to repro a Van Gogh to a sufficiently accurate degree. I just need it to "fool" me, not an expert.
Are the reproductions good enough to be mistaken for real masterpieces?
No, it is impossible. No one can do it. Even the original artist can’t do it.
Can’t do what?
Can’t fake their own painting.
That confuses me. Anyway, do you consider what you do forgery?
Even the great art works, like those by Van Gogh, belong to humanity, not only the museum or rich people.
Sufficient resolution and materials with identical color and refractive qualities should get you a visually identical result.
Of course, I made no such statement -- you did. I wonder which of us has a lower opinion of the lay public's capacity to appreciate art.
Back to the matter at hand, I'm fairly confident that a technology which faithfully reproduced artwork at the molecular level would be met with just as much contempt and hostility in the "art world". It has less to do with any sort of concern about the quality of the reproduction than it does with an aversion to seeing fine art placed in the hands of the masses.
Another challenge of reproducing art is that what makes the artwork so fantastic is the subtlest nuances. Those are not the 90% that many artists could do, but the .00001% that only Van Gogh could do. It's not just blue, or that shade of blue, or that precise shade ... but that unique color, in the context of all the other colors, on that spot on the canvas. Reproductions must have approximations and they must lose or weaken every nuance, unless the reproducer is another Van Gogh.
> The idea that it is only elites who can tell the difference is an unsupported statement about art appreciation among the general population.
Agreed and the argument often assumes that the impact of art is all conscious and explicit - 'people can't even tell you what the difference is' - when in fact artwork of any serious ambition aims far beyond what can be consciously noticed and enumerated (and again, those aims are achieved in the nuance). For my personal experience of it, museums are poorly set up, expecting me to engage with and grok dozens or more works in maybe an hour or two. Now I spend half an hour or more per work; that does mean skipping 95% them, but the experience is far more valuable, richer, and more gratifying. It's the difference between looking at vacation photos or visiting Italy.