Hi Horse and LilaQs,
Over in the unmoderated discussion, Horse wrote:-
>I've got one 9 year old boy and two one year old twin girls - eek!
They aren't by any chance IDENTICAL twins are they?
On 25 Feb 99, Horse wrote:-
> Jonathan
>> Does a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa have the same value as the
>> original?
>Jonathan, this is one of those great questions that raises a whole
bunch of other
>questions. Unless I am mistaken the value which you refer to is the
value relationship
>which exists between the copied Mona Lisa and myself (or whoever is
looking at it) - at
>least that's the angle I'll take on it.
I'm glad that you liked the question. Your answer makes it clear that
the
value goes way beyond the physical structure of the picture itself. Some
people value UNIQUENESS, which by definition cannot be copied:-)
For some, the connection with the original artist and his creative
activity
confers great value.
>If I am unaware that the copy I am looking at is a
>copy then there is no reason that I can
>think of why the value relationship between myself
>and the copy of the painting should be
>any different to the value relationship between
>myself and the original.
Our interaction with a copy undoubtedly has some of the same values as
interaction
with the original. Certainly, using a copy in a fine-arts course might
be equivalent to
displaying the original.
Let me suggest an example which may be rather different -
your great-grandfather's pocket watch. Here, the main value
may really be in the connection with HIM - the fact that that
very same watch sat for years in his pocket. No copy can ever
replicate that value.
OTOH, maybe you could be tricked into unknowingly accepting
a copy as the original. When years later, you learn of
the error, would the "copy" suddenly become worthless, or
would it now have some special value of its own?
[snip]
>The value relationship exists between myself and the painting not
>in the painting or in me. (Actually there may be a difference in that I
would be considering
>something other than just the painting, but the basic idea doesn't
change)
That last parenthetical statement is intriguing. Is "just the painting"
the objective part and
"something other" a subjective part? How do we classify the history of
the painting, its
uniqueness, the celebrity value of the artist? I can absolutely and
"objectively" state that
the Mona Lisa was painted in the seventeenth century (or whatever), that
the artist was
almost certainly Leonardo da Vinci, famous for many other art works and
designs, that
there are no known additional productions of the Mona Lisa by the
original artist, and
that it has an insured value of XXXX. There is absolutely no lab test
which can be
performed on the painting itself that can verify any of these "facts".
Thus there is no self-defining object to be objective about, but a
series of values which
involve all sorts of external interactions. The "object" would seem to
be an emergent
property of these values.
Jonathan
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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