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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

Dick's version of the Man in the High Castle has a good meditation on forgeries.

Mostly when people buy art, they're buying provenance, proof that a celebrity artist in history touched this particular object.

Forgers have gotten incredibly sophisticated, finding ways to duplicate the texture of historical paints and style of brush strokes of masters.

I think we'd do a lot of good for the world by commissioning as indistinguishable fakes as possible for all famous works, putting them in a room where the originals are all shuffled in, then sending them out into the world so any museum or private collector can have one, with some chance it's actually the real thing, but mostly the value would collapse to however sublime it is to actually look at the work.

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The value of art is not just the ‘celebrity’ of an artist like he were an actor pimping out a cash-in film. Making a cultural contribution to the arts is a part of carrying your civilisation forward. The artist is valuable because they were the nexus point for many values and inspirations that speak highly to the culture that produced them. Cavemen don’t make the Mona Lisa or michaenglo’s David. These works (among many) stand as monuments to a time and place that produced a peak of artistic, scientific, technological and cultural success. Owning and safeguarding those art pieces connects you to the products of the success of that passed civilisation, you carry the memory and product of many people and imply a bright future for the sons and daughters of that culture by holding up their successes above the ravages of war and nature.

Making copies defeats the point and is basically copying someone else’s homework and handing it in as your own. You stripped the point of doing the work to begin with for the sake of ‘spreading the wealth’. You didn’t make better artists that will produce new valuable works, you empowered lazy forgers who should be conservators of the past at best with that skill set.

The aesthetic value is only part of what took and a lot structure and skill to create. Art is not about appearance.

Disagree. I think GP is correct: most of the market value of paintings is in provenance of the physical object.

The "nexus point for many values and inspirations that speak highly to the culture that produced them" is fully encoded in the information content of the painting. With sufficiently good copying techniques, a physical painting can be copied or digitized while preserving all this. After all, whenever discussing "values and inspirations", you're usually not staring at an original, but at a cheap photocopy in some book or on a webpage - and yet the "values and inspirations" get communicated and discussed.

The aesthetic value is indeed only the part of a work - but again, contained within the information content. This includes provenance of the information. E.g. you derive joy from knowing this image was painted by Picasso, even though you're looking at a compressed digitization of a copy of a copy of the original painting.

GP's proposal would crash the art value to aesthetics + "values and inspirations", letting the culture partake in it better, and cutting out the scarcity.

If your criteria for appreciating art is merely looking at the image, the market is already "crashed". Google images has reproductions of nearly all paintings and art pieces ready to go. That hasn't happened.

There is more information in an artwork than what is presented as the final result. The techniques that go into constructing a painting are not reverse-engineer-able in every instance. You may produce the same brush strokes and end picture, but how you got there will be a different method, you won't be using the construction lines or dynamic symmetry of the masters that's passed down usually via oral tradition. Preserving those techniques enhances appreciation of the art and is a perspective worth preserving for it's own practical benefits.

Hatsheput's (female ancient egypt pharoah) funerary tomb was the first building to have outward facing columns that you could walk through. That style of outward facing columns became the standard style of ancient greek buildings, with steps leading up to outward facing columns. Columns you could walk through used to be confined to courtyards due to inferior architectural ability. None of that could be inferred simply by looking at the picture without prior education. The provenance of who built that or ordered it to be built in that manner is completely unknown to me, and does not change the fact that it is obviously a valuable building and an intriguing place to learn about what made the leap in architectural technology possible, how that culture was ahead of the game, how those people lived to make such a thing possible and to study the value of having outward facing colonnades among other ideas. All without knowing the author.

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