Copies and reproduction
by Bob on October 7, 2007
I was once talking, in person I might add with emphasis, with a girlfriend who worked at a major museum in New York City where we lived. She had studied art at the University of Pennsylvania and then at Oxford University for her doctoral work and was quite happily working for the museum in NYC.
So I asked her finally what she did there, being that she was very adequately eduacated for the task. She said "I work in the Copies and Reproduction Department". I was amazed. After all that education she was making Xerox copies ? I said carefully that when I was at university I worked part-time in the library, and also in its copying center where students could copy articles and pages on a Xerox machine.
She said with a sly smile that that wasn't what she did. This relieved me. She said she worked for the Reproduction Department which was a very important deparment in the museum. It copied works of art, many ancient, flawlessly, be it a sculpture or painting or a brass dish. I thought I knew why and said "Oh, for other museums and for scholars?". She said not only that. She said for the displays in the museum itself. I then asked if what I saw in the museum was a copy or the real thing. She said most of what the public saw was a flawless copy and the real object was kept elsewhere and somewhere safe. Now, obviously this isn't the case with all the art in a museum.
So, I realised what I saw might not be the real thing. It was an object lesson in life.
We can look at our society now which is obsessed with "designer" clothes and the like, and the label or insignia which seems to determine that it is indeed the "real thing" and then re-apply the lesson, and see that on the streets of NYC there are fake ones being sold all the time. And they look just like the real thing.
Being impressed by labels is a very slippery slope. We can pay a lot of money for the real thing or a fake.
This happens in the art world a lot. But it has hit home to modern common man, with clothing and almost anything.
One place found that the posh bottled water sold in an establishment was nothing more than plain tap water in a bottle with, yes, a perfect copy of the authentic label of the real company.
So how much around us is real or a reproduction ? It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference if we can at all anymore.
In the early 1900s, the brilliant scholar, Dr. Gisela Richter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, put together a catalogue of their antiquities with illustrations and it is considered a classic, with Dr. Richter's commentary. It was called "Handbook of the Classical Collection" for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They had no such handbook before she wrote it.
In it, Dr. Richter made an interesting observation about classical Greek art:
"Moreover, their [the Greeks] conception of beauty is one of which we are much in need today. The calm remoteness which distinguishes their best works is in such contrast to the restlessness of modern life that it affects us like the quiet of a cathedral after the bustle and confusion of the streets".
We must remember this sage advice today.
And to distinguish between the real thing or its imitator. Or to consciously not care.
The musician's union was really worried when films had a mechanical track of music recorded which would obviate the need for a live orchestra or musician in the actual theatre to accompany the film or even in performance. This was in 1929. It was supposed to implore people not to use mechanical music over real live musicians. Well we know what happened.
We must be able to tell if it's real or if it's an imitation. We should be able to. But sometimes we can't it seems in this day and age.
Otherwise it's a slippery slope, the world of pretense.