I think everyone should watch Orson Welles' F for Fake. The main theme of the documentary/exposé is that art is too rarely appreciated for what it is, but more for who made it. And everything went downhill as soon as "experts" started claiming that they could tell a "real" painting from a "fake" and acting as if the fake weren't also valuable as a work of art. If we just got rid of the experts...

Wikipedia calls it "meandering" but Welles is far too charismatic to be boring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake <- spoiler in the last 2 paragraphs of the "Plot" section

On a similar note, I would also recommend the film Exit Through the Gift Shop, which documents Thierry Guetta's rise in world of street art. While Thierry's artwork is largely considered unoriginal, he's able to make a considerable amount of money after being endorsed by Banksy.

There's a lot speculation saying that Banksy produced/created this film as a hoax to make precisely the same point - art is appreciated more for the person that made it.

Thanks for the recommendation. I've had vague memories of this for years, but I was so young when I saw it that I didn't know what it was.

A copy is not a piece of art. It's a copy of a piece of art. The original was made by the person who conceived the art. That is the value.

The logical conclusion is that "digital art" is an oxymoron, since it allows exact copies, indistinguishable from originals.

If you record yourself playing the violin, but digitally, that sequence of easily reproduced bits isn't a work of art, just a copy: the first copy, of which there will be a second and so on.

Also, literature cannot be art, because the words themselves are the poetry or prose, and not the specific representation in orgiginal handwriting or typesetting. When you read an author, you're not really reading the art, but a copy of the art.

A handwritten manuscript may be a form of visual art, but what if the manuscript was produced with a generic typewriter, or digitally ...

I think what was meant is that the act of copying is not art. Downloading an application isn't programming.

Then how can the "original" painting be a work of art? It's just an artifact of an act of creation. If art is in the act, then the artwork is dead as soon as it is finished.

Suppose I own a piece-of-art and a copy. I swap molecules between them gradually, until the original no longer has any of its original molecules, and the copy has them all.

Which is the piece-of-art?

The art world probably has bizarre ideologies because they serve as investments and status symbols to elite patrons/customers. (And while the artist lives, they'd like to get paid. But our world isn't dominated by artists, so their subsistence isn't considered as important.)

I don't think your description of copying is particularly useful regarding physical art, as that type of "replicator" technology (molecule switching) is far, far away. In reality copies are, well, never so completely identical (far from it). Of course whether or not one can actually detect the differences is another matter, and at which level of detection one is required to differentiate copy from original is necessary is yet another.

What do you think about museums -- a public institution that is more or less the antithesis of your view of the art world? Without going into semantics, let's say you have a genuinely old artefact. Now someone comes along and makes a replica. Let's say they're virtually identical, and the only difference is in the carbon dating, which you can't really fake. Which one should be admitted into the museum?

Another communist!

I'm not sure why you have been downvoted. I think the sentiment you're expressing is a very common intuition that people have about art. It's uncomfortable to think about, because it leads to the logical conclusion that art is really about status rather than about the work itself. On the other hand, if art really is about the work itself apart from considerations about status or historical context, then art is no longer rare; there's great stuff everywhere.

Some very skillful work, though I have a hard time imagining a museum accepting such copies as originals, at least assuming they had a print of the original to compare with. The basic structure is there, and pretty perfectly from what I can see, but some details differ. What kind of review process goes on at museums in these situations?

I was awestruck at how easily detectable these things were, side by side to the originals. It's amazing to me that in this day and age, if this is considered 'par', that any paintings could be successfully forged.

That said, in a day and age before the internet, before the originals could be easily pulled up on a phone, I could very easily see how these would be convincing.

That was my thought too. Perhaps this is more a case of successful social engineering of museum acquisitions people than of artistic prowess.

Agree, the examples shown here are not convincing. I am aware that my screen might not render the colors faithfully, but the fakes really lack subtlety and 'understanding'. For example, look at Charles Courtney Curran, “Three Women” (1894). The left piece is completely wrong; sunset but the highlights are blueish white. The right piece makes me looking at it by the subtle evening light that brings the scene to life—highlight on the hair, cheeks, the robes. All is gone on the left.

The same holds for “Terrassiers, au Trocadero”, the warm blue's are replaced by some heavy cold ones. Also a lot of lost detail again.

I have seen way better replica's.

The colours are different because of the difference in age. They tend to fade...

I know they change, but not this way for this age of the painting. Also: not fading per se, (oil) paintings tend to get dirty over time and hence get darker.

reminds of the nice Incognito movie from 1997 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oCcOh4_LBg, if you can handle Russian :) ...or http://vdownload.eu/watch/12633399-incognito-1997-eng.html if you can handle pirate)