[ExI] THE MIGHTY ORIGINAL

[Damien Broderick]

On 11/1/2010 11:48 AM, John Clark wrote:

> This universal obsession with the original makes me wonder if it could
> be the result of an innate flaw in  our mental wiring; otherwise it's
> difficult to explain something like the persistent irrationality in the
> art market.

It's very easy to understand, in a culture that fetishizes individual 
ownership. Once, only the wealthy could afford to pay an excellent 
painter to handmake a likeness of the family, the residence, the dog or 
the god. These were unique and occasionally were even prized for their 
aesthetic value.

With what is called by scholars The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 
suddenly a thousand or a million pleasing or useful indistinguishable 
objects could be turned out like chair legs. Art-as-index-of-wealth and 
art-as-index-of-superior taste had to adjust, valorizing the individual 
work, and especially the item that could not be a copy.

When nanotech arrives, capable of replicating the most distinctive and 
rare items, this upheaval will happen again. Have you ever seen a real 
van Gogh? The thick raised edges of the paint, catching the light 
differently from different angles? Next to that, printed reproductions 
are dull, faithless traitors. If nano makes it possible to compile an 
exact copy in three dimensions, only the fourth will be lost--and that 
irretrievably, except to the most extreme tests. We'll see increasingly 
what we have seen as avant-garde for a century: evanescent art, 
performance, destruction of an art work after its creation. And in 
addition, a widespread downward revaluation of originals *of the 
art-work kind*.

All of this might have some bearing on how individuals regard 
*themselves* as "originals", but we have no experiences of nearly exact 
human copies other than the near resemblance of twins, triplets, etc. 
Certainly monozygotic "copies" of people usually have a marked fondness 
for each other, but they don't consider each other as mutually fungible.

Damien Broderick