The value of beauty

A few years ago, Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust set a new record when it sold for more that 100 million dollars. Would the value have been the same for a perfect copy, a copy that was so good that even Picasso could not say which was his original and which was the copy?

According to "Dulwich Picture Gallery's 'fake' painting revealed" (2015), a copy of an Old Master painting, which was ordered from a reproduction business in China, replaced an original work at the English art gallery replace. Although only 10% were able to identify the copy, trying to spot greatly successfully increased the attention visitors gave to all of the great works of art in the gallery.

I thought of a couple of connections between this BBC News story and our class. The first one was the discussion of plagiarism that came up this morning as a result of the very good comments many of you made last night when you analysed my earlier blog post here. It isn't in my summary above, but the Chinese group that provides the copies of famous works is careful to make it clear that they are copies: they "change the size slightly from the originals" (2015), so they are very honest that their copies are not the original. Similarly, when I copied and pasted the words in the last sentence, I put them in "quotation marks" so that you knew I had copied and pasted, and I also added the parenthetical (year) to clearly point to my source in the list of references below. I haven't plagiarised, and the Chinese studio are not forgers.

Another obvious connection with our class is that we've spent the last few days looking carefully at a copy of a painting in Quest. Perhaps some people think we've been looking too carefully at it; the bad news is you might have look even more carefully over the weekend.

The copy and original Fragonards look quite
different when hung side by side.
I wonder if I'd have spotted the fake?

But the thing that most interested me were the sorts of questions I asked in my lead in. Would anyone have paid the same enormous amount of money for a perfect copy of the Picasso painting? It doesn't worry me that some people are willing to pay that much, and unlike much art that is famous, I think Picasso really did produce great art, with real value, but the value is surely in the art, in the colours, the arrangements of shapes, the textures and so on. The fact that the work is by Picasso should be irrelevant to how beautiful the work of art is.

But Nude, Green Leaves and Bust is definitely not my favourite Picasso painting. I think he created many other works that are better. What do you think?

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Reference

Dulwich Picture Gallery's 'fake' painting revealed. (2015, April 28). BBC News Entertainment & Arts. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32493860