Forgeries, Luxury Goods and Value

Blake Gopnik pointed out that when it comes to art forgeries, most people can “marvel at the forgers’ skill and lament their misdeeds”. Besides, he says:
“If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight.”
And:
“In some ways, they (forgeries) are by him (the famous artist), in the profound sense that they almost perfectly capture his unique contribution to art. If they didn’t, no one would imagine he’d made them.”
And isn’t the only difference between a forgery and the standard practice of earlier times that one was authorized by the master and the other wasn’t?
“Many wonderful works of art by figures such as Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens were executed partly or even mostly by their studio assistants, which doesn’t make them any less expressive of Titian or Rembrandt’s innovations.”
Then Gopnik uses the art-should-be-for-all argument:
“Our current market, geared toward the ultra-wealthy, is helping few and hurting many…It’s also hurting all the art lovers, current and future, who deserve work that’s conceived to address artistic issues, not to sell well to robber barons.”
Forgeries also prick the snob bubble:
“Every time an expert is fooled by a fake, the faker has once again taught us that connoisseurship is not to be trusted.”

So why does “original” art command such ridiculous prices? Seth Godin feels it has to do with the concept of luxury goods:
“When a good like this (and it might be a service as well) comes to market, it sometimes transcends the value equation and enters a new realm, one of scarcity and social proof. The value, ironically, comes from its lack of value.”

You’d think the Internet would tame the luxury goods beast, at least to some extent. Godin certainly thinks so:
“Because the net makes pricing transparent, which inevitably makes some people feel stupid for paying full price (and stupidity doesn't work with the other pillars of luxury).”

What about digital works of art? They should have zero value, because “digital art is shared, liked, retweeted and embedded free-of-charge all over the web”, right? Wrong! Phillips, a prestigious art auction house, combined with Tumblr  to auction digital works of art. The pieces went between $800 to $16,000 each!

Just goes to show that the Internet doesn’t just destroy old systems: sometimes, it transforms them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more