The robot Erasmus in the book Sandworms of Dune literally does not understand that a stroke-for-stroke reproduction of a Vincent van Gogh painting is not a work of genius equal to the original. He has a materialistic viewpoint that says items are equivalent if they are molecularly identical, and therefore they share all traits. If one is a work of genius, so is the other. But why is he mistaken?
If van Gogh himself had been hooked up to an aparatus that duplicated his brush strokes at the time of the original painting, would the two be works of genius equal to each other, or would it only be the one that his own physical hand had touched? Then what if his motions were recorded and later replayed to produce a third painting? Is there an abstract concept that makes the work priceless and its reproductions worthless? Does the existence of such faithful reproductions devalue the original as a work of art?
Mokalus of Borg
PS - I'm not so sure now that Erasmus was wrong.
PPS - Mostly because I can't define the distinguishing concept.
2 comments:
I think it has to do with the human desire to be unique.
It doesn't matter whether the duplicate painting was done by the same person in exactly the same way - it's the fact that there's two of them - that it's not one of a kind - that makes it less valuable.
At the end of the day, people want to be special and unique and out of the ordinary. Owning something that is 'one of a kind' is one way to do that.
Well, that's what I think anyway.
True, I hadn't thought of uniqueness as a value-adding property. It doesn't speak much to the genius of an exact copy, but enough to keep me thinking.
Post a Comment