How much intrinsic value does an original piece of art have over a copy?

[Proteus_MST]

Sounds to me like a question like:
If you have a historical ship (maybe 900 years old) and in terms of continuous restauration works over a long time span one piece after other replace all of the historic wood (and other material like nails and the like) by replicas (which were manifactured by using the same processes that were used by the original builders of the ship) so that finally not one piece of the historic building material of the ship remains (although the ship still looks like before),
has this ship still the same historical value that it possessed before the restauration works?

[SlowwHand]

Original




Copy

[Kitschum]

about 10 000x

[Lorizael]

Sounds to me like a question like:
If you have a historical ship (maybe 900 years old) and in terms of continuous restauration works over a long time span one piece after other replace all of the historic wood (and other material like nails and the like) by replicas (which were manifactured by using the same processes that were used by the original builders of the ship) so that finally not one piece of the historic building material of the ship remains (although the ship still looks like before),
has this ship still the same historical value that it possessed before the restauration works?

Are you Theseus' DL?

[JEELEN]

How much intrinsic value does an original piece of art have over a copy?

Intrinsic meaning e.g. how much more would you pay for the original than for the copy even if it were impossible for you to get any profit by the sale of either (due to government price controls or the impossibility of authenticating the original or whatever). Use whichever benchmark piece of art you like, or the Mona Lisa if you'd prefer to use a generic piece of art. Anything larger than, say, the David is off limits, due to the difficulty in copying e.g. the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty.

No poll. My vote is cast for "none."

Basically the intrinsic value of a piece of art is priceless - it is invaluable. (However, to name a counter-example, a number of ancient Greek statue masterpieces are only available today as Roman copies, as the originals have been lost. On second thought, that is not really a counter-example, but rather a further example: the originals would be worth far more than the copies.)

[Alex]

It really depends on the degree of craftsmanship involved.

[SlowwHand]

I suppose that at the most base level, there is no difference between an item whose worth is high, vs. an item whose worth is low, so low that no one wants it.
Both are priceless.

[Pekka]

Well, the economy of art is usually driven by scarcity and the desires of the community within and around this economy. OK, so in my opinion the piece HAS to be copied so its value will go up. It simply emphasizes the originality of YOUR object, and it has become obvious that there is a great desire for it. It underlines the scarcity of what you own and how much it is in demand. It is like free marketing to your possession.

One could say the economy of art, and how much art lovers value your object and are willing to bid to get it themselves, is inherently entangled with the system of desires, which in turn determines how the value driven economy of art evolves from one price point to another. So yes, the more popular the piece is in terms of copies, I'd say the more value the actual item has.

[Zkribbler]

I remember a few years back, going to the Getty Museum and being transfixed by a bust of the Roman Emperor Caligula. It gave me the willies to think that, while this work of art was bing created, one of the great human-monsters of all times was sitting next to it, posing. "Hey Cally. Look a little to your left and try not to sneer. Beautiful, baby!"

For me, the price of that would be beyond measure.

How much would I pay for a copy of it? Not much.

[Lefty Scaevola]

Nwabudike Morgan shall have answered this question a few hundred years hence.

[Alex]

Nwabudike Morgan shall have answered this question a few hundred years hence.

Aah, good memories...

[JEELEN]

It really depends on the degree of craftsmanship involved.

That is not necessarily a necessary component. Certain modern great works of art show a remarkable lack of craftmanship.

[KrazyHorse]

Intrinsic meaning e.g. how much more would you pay for the original than for the copy even if it were impossible for you to get any profit by the sale of either (due to government price controls or the impossibility of authenticating the original or whatever). Use whichever benchmark piece of art you like, or the Mona Lisa if you'd prefer to use a generic piece of art. Anything larger than, say, the David is off limits, due to the difficulty in copying e.g. the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty.

No poll. My vote is cast for "none."

Really? I'm pretty sure that you'd pay at least 100$ for the privilege of burning the original Mona Lisa. I know I would.

[Kuciwalker]

In that case, the value is extrinsic: it comes from enjoying the horror of other people.

[Drake Tungsten]

A good place to begin thinking about Alma Thomas’s ravishing late work might be the moment in 1964 when, close to paralysis and bedridden, the 73-year-old artist found herself staring at the hollyhock shadows she had known her entire life and calculating how to use them in her paintings. A year earlier, she had seen the late Matisse cutouts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Matisse’s work had prompted her to paint an acrylic-on-canvas version of his collage The Snail (1953), in which nearly all the original colors were reversed. Thomas named her painting Watusi (Hard Edge), after Chubby Checker’s dance hit “The Watusi.” As well as marrying high modernism with the popular culture of black America–then entering the American mainstream–the title she chose noted Matisse’s debt to African art.

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/10/08/do-the-watusi-art-imitation-and-the-obamas/

Interesting case. Can the race/life story of the artist imbue what would otherwise be a shameless copy with value?