Gregory's ServerI just don't understand why someone would want to exclusively own a work of art
like I get prints and exclusive downloads but, exclusive ownership is an alien concept
Shark Blackle
10 comments
Darius Kazemi
@SuricrasiaOnline perhaps a little less cynically: good art makes the body thrum. and there is a lot of art that simply can't be copied -- a copy of a painting just does not hold a candle to the original. It's hard to describe in words, but I understand wanting, say, a specific original painting in my home all the time so I can look at it and experience that body thrumming feeling whenever I want.
Darius Kazemi
@SuricrasiaOnline it's a greedy feeling, but I get it, way more than I get the investment stuff
Shark Blackle
@darius is that not a failure of printing technology that it can't reproduce the painting correctly?
Darius Kazemi
@SuricrasiaOnline I like it because they describe why perfect duplicability is both an advantage AND a disadvantage
Shark Blackle
@darius oh I have read this. I think I can understand but I guess I just don't "get it" in my gut
Darius Kazemi
@SuricrasiaOnline I didn't understand it until I started going to lots of art museums and seeing works in person that I had only seen (very good) copies of myself. And I just... understood the art on a level that I never got it on paper. Like a Miró in person, for me, is full of meaning and energy and life in a way that prints and high-resolution scans are simply not. 
phooky
@SuricrasiaOnline @darius i don't think we can even *record* color accurately, much less reproduce it. i'm red-green colorblind (anomalous trichromat). this doesn't mean I can't see certain colors; it means my cones are tuned to different frequencies. i routinely am surprised by paintings i've seen reproductions of, because the capture/repro mechanisms are tuned for different eyes than mine
Darius Kazemi
@phooky @SuricrasiaOnline this is a great example of how reproduction necessarily flattens things. I think if we had a star trek level replicator where we could atom-by-atom copy a painting and its canvas etc etc it *might* be close enough to get 99% of that energy across to people, but... we don't, so. |
@SuricrasiaOnline think about it as an investment property like real estate. it's gross, but that's how they think about it! a place to hoard their money with certain rights conferred. it's not really about the art. when it *is* about the art, it's about social status. "I have this thing that someone else can't have." but ultimately that is the same reason real estate is real estate -- exclusive ownership, coming down to money and power