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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

Many comments here are clamoring for immutable masters. We also see comments elsewhere complaining when historic buildings receive a an addition in a contemporary architectural style etc.

For most of human history art has always been mutable. If you tour the National Gallery of Art there are plenty of paintings that have been changed throughout out the years to match changing and politics or theologies.

In fact, most performance art has always been somewhat unique. Every show Shakespeare put on was slightly different.

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Did the instance of the painting change? Or did what was in the art collection change? I don't care of the collection changes, but I might care if people are scribbling on the paintings for whatever reasons. Unlike a Shakespeare show, digital media can be reproduced perfectly for little cost, the fact that multiple unique instances of a theme can be different doesn't mean that we should.

In practice yes, Museums occasionally clean & restore their paintings which shifts the color balance, grain, texture similar ways.

There's a some great pre/post conservation photo in this article: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/as-layers-of-old-varnish-are-rem...

IIUIC, the restorers are not changing the original but merely restoring the degradation that the works of art suffer. The paintings are 600 years old, you'd figure that the colors would be a lot more vibrant when it was painted than in the "pre-restoration" state.

Digital art does not have this problem.

A Vermeer painting was recently restored, and it went beyond the normal "make it look brand new": restorers removed paint layers that we've learned were someone painting over a part of Vermeer's original work to hide it. The painting now on display shows something markedly different from how centuries of viewers have seen it.

https://hyperallergic.com/672345/vermeer-restoration-finally...

>Digital art does not have this problem.

https://xkcd.com/1683/

On a less smug note, truly digital art might not have that problem, but digital representations of analogue art (which the topic of discussion falls under) do. Most movies are just digital encodings of analogue film, and it's only very recently this stopped being true.

And that's not to mention the fact that the way you that you view digital files also affects them. There's the general trend towards denser displays requiring higher resolutions for a file to appear crisp, but even the screen technology itself is a factor - take a look at how much different pixel sprites look on modern displays compared to the CRTs they were designed for:[1][2]

[1] https://twitter.com/crtpixels

[2] https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-co...

I think we can have both things. There's no particular reason why the various revisions of a digital product can't be kept available.

For example: I keep both the Star Wars Despecialized Edition and the blu-ray release on my jellyfin server and then you can just pick your preference with a drop-down menu. I'd love to see the same setup on official services.

> Every show Shakespeare put on was slightly different.

And it would be awesome to have each and every one on film.

> Many comments here are clamoring for immutable masters.

Which are essentially free. We can't do this with buildings.

> For most of human history art has always been mutable. If you tour the National Gallery of Art there are plenty of paintings that have been changed throughout out the years to match changing and politics or theologies.

Interesting point. The reason people object more strongly to this, then, may have something to do with the different relationships people have to popular, commercial movies and fine art, or to the difference between touring a museum and watching a movie in your home. More research needed as to the reasons why, but in any case people do feel a certain way about it.

I love that people think that an immutable master would help. Because an image projected from film in a theatre in 1999 is of course going to establish how something should be rendered on an LED/OLED flat panel today.

Consumer Complaint: we would rather "X" Response: ACKSHULLY, {everything} has always been "Y" so the "X" you want as a consumer is kinda invalid

This argument sequence is a special kind of infuriating

I think the problem is that choice is a burden. When there's only one version of a film available, it's great. But then a "better" version becomes available and all of a sudden it's not great. Or is it? Now you need to think twice before you watch that film as you wouldn't want to miss the better version.

I believe this the subject of a book The Paradox of Choice. I've only read a synopsis of it and it seems to match my own experience.