In the medium-sized city (population 1.9m) where I live, I can read the same book in the same edition as you do. In the music shops I can buy exactly the same sheet music as you can. We have half a dozen concert halls and the performers play from the same scores as they do in Osaka or Boston or Amsterdam. Our local actors memorise their lines from the same text of Julius Caesar as yours do, and dance companies follow the same models of the classical ballets. All are using copies of texts, scores and charts. The originals are really only for specialists.
However, when I go to the municipal art gallery here, all this changes. It cannot use copies and reproductions. And, since it cannot afford to buy great, or even very good original paintings, in its vast rooms hang poor quality foreign paintings and indiscriminate local work. On the one hand, there is the public library, concert halls, theatres and cinemas. On the other is the public art gallery. The former are universal, the latter is provincial.
I have asked people involved with other undernourished art galleries in cities of this size: why the insistence on showing original specimens? But when I suggest that the best way to get Velazquez into Kansas City (or Bordeaux, Melbourne or Nagoya) is by copy, the exchange seizes up.
Why aren't copies of great paintings shown in the public art galleries that lack them? Generally, two reasons are given. First, it is said, faithful copies cannot be made. But faithful copies can be made - and indeed have been made - by artists and forgers, which experts can't distinguish from the originals. Human painters probably make the best copiers but there are photographic techniques which can yield duplicates with the utmost fidelity. There are also new computer methods, notably gicl? which can reproduce a painting as it was originally done. If the reproduction is the same size as the original and mounted in the same way, it is indistinguishable, even to the brushwork.
The second reason given is that full appreciation of a painting depends on the belief that it is the original specimen touched by the artist's own hands. One concedes that full appreciation of a holy relic or a tailor-made suit depends on such a belief. However, in terms of artistic communication, the first specimen is of value only to its owner or a specialist antiquarian. It is the copies that count. Is a painting, like a piece of the true cross, valuable only because of its sacredness? Or is it an artistic communication, detachable from its original handiwork? The art world must believes the former, otherwise why the huge prices for the originals? And without that stress on the originals, how can sufficient reverence be generated to draw over 10,000 visitors a day through the National Gallery in London or 14,000 through the Louvre?
It suits the painters, the collectors, and the owners of the best paintings to spread the view that only the original is significant. You can look through 50 books on art appreciation and never see the words "reproduction," "copy," "duplicate," or "replica." If duplication is mentioned, it is done with unforgiving dismissal. Bloomsbury's 1996 "Guide to Art" says "although copies may ape the original in every way, their artistic value has been questioned and they have little commercial worth."
Even a clear-headed critic like Robert Hughes, who points out in his Harold Rosenberg memorial lecture that "never before have the visual arts been the subject... of such extreme inflation and fetishisation," adds that today we want "the authentic, expressive, incarnated touch of the artist." Incarnated, indeed. The best painting is considered the least communicable, and to present its duplicate is thought to remove its essential qualities.
Meanwhile, I - and millions of others outside the main art centres - are left with "Bluebells in the Rockies" by Mrs Prothero. I believe we constitute a large, easily identified, and solvent market for enjoying great paintings as "authentically" as we enjoy reading Julius Caesar or listening to the "Hammerklavier". If the art world will not serve us, I suggest the publishing world can.
Publishers and libraries should enter the business of presenting exact duplicate representations of paintings to those who cannot without great difficulty see the originals. In my own city of Vancouver, I am sure there are enough people to pay a sufficiently high price to view regular exhibitions of famous painters, in lifesize reproductions. Exhibition space, if need be, could be rented from the public art gallery. The success of the business would depend on reliable validation of each copy, a reasonable price for reproduction rights, good quality control and intelligent selection of initial markets. I suggest also that members of the public would want to buy these duplicates after the exhibition. I even believe that this new business would be to the advantage of the great collections. At present, the world's leading art galleries and museums complain they have too many visitors but not enough money. The dissemination of copies would help solve both problems. The number of viewers for old masters in, let's say, 100 towns and cities would reach into the millions and the reproduction fees would be substantial.
This will happen if I am right that painting is a communicating art, like music. If I am wrong and painting is no more profound than couture, it will not take much money or time to discover.
