Thursday, June 19, 2008

Reproduction: Past, Present, Future

"A man paints with his brains and not with his hands." – Michelangelo

"[T]he earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first magical, then the religious kind…. [T]he unique value of the 'authentic' work has its basis in ritual…. [F]or the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics." – Walter Benjamin [1]

"I'm interested in the distribution of physical vehicles in the form of editions because I'm interested in spreading ideas. The objects are only understandable in relations to my ideas. The work I do politically has a different effect on people because such a product exists than it would have if the means of expression were only the written word. Although these products may not seem suitable for bringing about political change, I think more emanates from them than if the ideas behind them were revealed directly. To me the vehicle quality of the editions is important...." – Joseph Beuys [2]

"I like things to be exactly the same over and over again. I don't want it to be essentially the same—I want it to be exactly the same." – Andy Warhol [3]

"A painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination." – Sherrie Levine [4]


In contemporary America, and with global reach, culture has been redefined as intellectual property. This is the only game in town. Multinational corporations are the dominant players, absorbing and provoking counter-cultures and traditional cultures alike. The rules are inordinately complex, involving worldwide legal systems that only an army of experts can decipher. The action is connected by chaotic technological infrastructures that simultaneously reduce all cultural production into a single digital currency, while unleashing infinite possibilities for creative expression. Reproduction—be it virtual or physical—is the ultimate prize: the primary mode by which creators communicate their contributions to a larger audience and capture the full value of their work.

Technological revolutions spur new opportunities and new limits, pioneers and resistance. These effects are extreme in the fine arts, with its contradictory values of innovation and tradition, fame and rarity, originality and universality, subversion and awe. Will the digital reproduction of ideas—in the form of images, words, sounds, movement, and numbers—have as profound of an effect in the Twenty-First Century as the invention of mechanical reproduction had in the Fifteenth Century? Will visual artists be at the cutting edge of these changes as they were six-hundred years ago? The answer lies in how creative professionals engage the world of intellectual property and communicate to the public at large.

Western society has evolved over centuries toward ever more liberal conventions of cultural access, but each generation must repeat the struggle. With every advance in the reproductive dissemination of cultural creation comes a conservative reaction that longs for older traditions, and tries to reign in the effects of technologically wrought change. Artists have played leading roles on both sides of this historical debate. Digital reproduction is at the heart of today's tussle of cultural evolution. While important aspects of digital reproduction are new, many of the tensions posed are ancient in origins.


[1] Benjamin, 1935.
[2] Beuys 1970.
[3] Warhol 1989.
[4] Levine 1982.

Reproduction: A Democratic Impulse

Within a few decades of the death of Johannes Gutenberg (1397-1468), and just a few towns over, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the son of a goldsmith, elevated the humble woodcut from a simple tool for printing playing cards and devotionals to the level of artistic masterpiece. Dürer's accomplishment rested on an ancient history of art reproduction. Some of the earliest art known to man are 25,000-year-old stenciled hand prints [PLATE 1] on the walls of Pyrenees caves. [1] In ancient Greece, founding and stamping was used to reproduce art on coins, bronzes and terra cottas.[2] The earliest relief prints came with the invention of paper in China (105 a.d.). Stone rubbings, stenciling, and eventually woodcut prints spread Buddhism throughout Asia, including the earliest dated printed book from 868 a.d., called the Diamond Sutra [PLATE 2], an illustrated Buddhist scroll. The Chinese invented moveable clay type by 1041.

In 1436, six centuries after the Diamond Sutra was printed, Gutenberg built the first press with replaceable wooden or metal letters. What Mark Twain calls "the incomparably greatest event in the history of the world" is widely credited with igniting the Renaissance and causing the most profound cultural and sociological change. Until then, books—the Bible and Torah in particular—were rare objects, treasured symbols of elite wealth, power, and literacy. Within a century, tens of millions of books were distributed throughout Europe; printed words and images were no longer the sole domain of nobility and clergy. Mechanical reproduction shook the foundations of religious authority with its enlightening and democratizing effects for the emerging merchant classes.

Dürer's first commission was to illustrate Sebastian Brant's Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) [PLATE 3], published in 1494 by Johann Bergmann de Olpe. This illustrated manuscript became the Western World's first bestseller, with multiple editions and translations into all European languages. Dürer's prints anticipate many of the sensibilities and artistic concerns of our postmodern, digital age. He participated in one of the first mass market phenomena, experimented with a far-reaching new technology, and created such symbolically complex and self-conscious woodcuts as der Messung (Work about the Art of Drawing, 1538) [PLATE 4], which encourages speculation about reality and simulation, gender and creativity, gaze and frame, difference and domination.[3]

Gutenberg's invention marks the exact midway point of the twelve centuries between our age of digital reproduction and the first printed book. It is remarkable to consider that the democratic, anti-elitist impulse of reproduced words and images has been there from the start—even if motivated by religious belief. The world's first public domain notice was clearly printed on the last page of the Diamond Sutra: "reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Chieh on behalf of his two parents on the 15th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Hsien-t'ung."[4]





1. Gallery of Hands. ca. 30,000 BC.
Panel of Hand Stencils at the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc that were created by blowing pigments onto a hand placed against the wall. The black profile is a mammoth walking to the left (back, forehead, trunk). It was drawn after the hand. Courtesy of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/index.html





2. The Diamond Sutra. 868 AD.
The world's earliest printed book. Courtesy of The British Library. http://www.chinapage.com/print1.html





3. Albrecht Dürer. Woodcut to Chapter 52 of Sebastian Brant's Das Narrenschiff. 1494.
Johann Bergmann de Olpe, Basel. Reprinted in and courtesy of The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, ed. Willi Kurth (New York: Dover, 1963). http://www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/assets/images/luchre.gif





4. Albrecht Dürer. Man Drawing a Reclining Woman. 1538.
From the second edition of Underweysung der Messung (Work about the Art of Drawing). Originally printed in Nuremberg. Reprinted in and courtesy of The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, ed. Willi Kurth (New York: Dover, 1963). http://www.vanedwards.co.uk/month/jul99/month.htm


[1] Paglia 2004; Wisniowski 2003.
[2] Benjamin 1935.
[3] Felluga 2003; Wolf 1990.
[4] Carter 1925.

Reproduction: Intransigent Hierarchies

Resistance from reigning elites has usually accompanied the democratic possibilities of advances in reproduction technologies. William Tyndale (1494-1536) [PLATE 5] was born the same year that Ship of Fools was published. Exactly one century after Gutenberg's invention, Tyndale was burned at the stake for attempting to publish the first English translation of the Bible in Britain.

Privileged opposition to the printing press was widespread from the outset, ranging from disdain to censorship to far worse. Libraries and their patrons favored hand-copied Latin manuscripts; scholars praised the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of handwritten codices.[1] Such deep attachments to the purity of hand-made arts and traditional modes of communication echo throughout the ages. The most sophisticated gatekeepers of "high culture" typically have frowned on new technologies and more popular styles of expression that promise greater public access and appreciation.

Painting and sculpture were regarded as manual crafts in the Western World until the Renaissance, when the status of such visually accessible creations was finally elevated to the level of arts alongside poetry and music.[2] Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) helped establish the prominence of painters, sculptors and architects with his Lives of Artists (1568) [PLATE 6], but continued to dismiss woodcuts and other printmaking techniques, and certainly any print not made by a painter's hand.[3] The same prejudice is integral to the structure of the visual art market to this day, with New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman calling prints, "the proverbial stepchild" of the visual arts.[4] Originality, authenticity, provenance, rarity, and quality are the hallmarks of value in fine art. This is a profoundly political equation. The flip side is at the core of Walter Benjamin's seminal 1935 article, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which has become so influential that contemporary art guru David Ross quips, "it seems everyone is required to quote from [it]."[5]

By the end of the Renaissance, the lowly status accorded printmaking by the Guild of Holland was precisely why Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) [PLATE 7] began etching. Working in a medium at the periphery of established artistic concern freed him to experiment outside of academic controls and dogma. Rembrandt's exclusive relationship with his publisher and dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh is emblematic of the significance of printing to his life as an artist. Rembrandt not only lived in Uylenburgh's home for years, but even married Uylenburgh's cousin Saskia, the subject of many Rembrandt masterpieces.

Rembrandt's lifetime marks the birth of licensing in the West, which began as a means for censuring "naughty printed books" (as stated in Henry VIII's proclamation of 1538) and protecting the interests of church, state, and a small oligopoly of commercial printers.[6] "The contractual association between artist and publisher was at the heart of the printmaking enterprise and represents an essential pattern of early licensing," according to legal scholar Brooke Oliver."[7] In 1662, the King of England decreed the first European licensing act, and in 1710, the Statute of Anne was passed, becoming the first copyright act in the world. Controlling the reproduction of words and images was paramount, as interest in such forms of expression was not quelled by hierarchical standards and bias alone.







1. Death of William Tyndale (1536). 1563.
On a platform before castle walls, Tyndale ("Lord opé the king of Englands eies"), in a loin cloth, is chained to a stake by an executioner; a large crowd of soldiers, monks, and civilians look on. Series 3 (2nd) Implied Book, Friars, one gesturing with hand Loinclothed martyrs, incl. Jerome of Prague. John Foxe. Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church ("Foxe's Book of Martyrs”). John Day, London, 1563. Courtesy of Ohio State University Library. http://dlib.lib.ohio-state.edu/foxe/







2. Giorgio Vasari. Title Page, Lives of Artists. 1550.
From The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Florence. Courtesy of The Australian National University. http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/giorgio.vasari/








3. Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. Beggar Leaning on a Stick. ca. 1630.
Etching, 3-3/8 x 1-7/8 in. (8.6 x 4.8 cm); sheet: 3-1/2 x 2 in. (8.9 x 5.1 cm). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rembp/hob_26.72.156.htm



[1] Keating and Hargitai 1999.
[2] Witcombe 1997.
[3] Wyckoff 2000, p. 15.
[4] Kimmelman 2005.
[5] Ross 1999.
[6] Unwin, Unwin and Tucker 2004.
[7] Oliver 2004.

Reproduction: Opening the Floodgates

Rembrandt may be remembered today primarily as a great painter, but etchings are what first made him famous throughout Europe.[1] Prints were a way to sell art to a larger market than could afford to buy or travel to view an original oil painting.[2] Rembrandt biographer Gary Schwartz argues "it was Rembrandt the etcher who most palpably changed the history of art."[3] Rembrandt produced 300 etchings, and his plates were printed upon over and over again under his supervision and long after his death.[4] But this master's prolificacy represents just the beginning of the more widespread distribution of art to come.

Within a hundred years of Rembrandt's death, a young Japanese artist would begin work raising the level of artistic reproduction by two orders of magnitude. Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) [PLATE 8] produced an astonishing 35,000 drawings and prints in his lifetime (an average of two per day), continuing the ancient tradition of woodcut printing, which the Japanese call Ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world." Meanwhile, Hokusai's French contemporary Alois Senefelder (1771-1834) invented lithography in 1798 to publicize his plays, creating a process capable of printing 30,000 impressions with one lithographic stone.

By the second half of the Nineteenth Century, Europe had witnessed not only the influx of Japanese woodcuts, but also the transformational inventions of the industrial revolution: photography, halftones, color-separation, and steam-powered presses capable of printing 10,000 sheets per hour. First came Daguerreotypomania [PLATE 9], after the French government publicized the existence of this early photographic process in the summer of 1839, then Japonisme took over with the reopening of trade with the West in 1854, and finally the poster craze plastered Paris once Jules Chéret (1836-1932) [PLATE 10] opened his print shop in 1866, and Europe was flooded with posters by Bonnard [PLATE 11], Toulouse-Latrec [PLATE 12], and many others (a trend that continues today with the ubiquitous poster reproductions of Degas [PLATE 13] and other artists of the time).







1. Katsushika Hokusai. Kohada Koheiji. ca. 1830.
From Hyaku-Monogatari ("Ghost Tales"). Chúban size woodblock color print. Signature: Zen Hokusai hitsu. Publisher: Tsuru-ya Kiemon. One of the many stories of a man who turned into a snake or serpent after his death. Courtesy of the Tikotin Museum of Japanese in Haifa, Israel. http://www.asianart.com/articles/rubin/4.html





2. Theodore Maurisset. Daguerreotypemania. 1839.
Lithograph with applied color, 25.4 x 35.1 cm. Courtesy of the George Eastman House. http://www.geh.org/ne/cromer/m198004610003_ful.html#topofimage








3. Jules Chéret. Palais de Glace - Jeune Fille. 1894.
Original lithograph poster in colours. Signed and dated in the stone. Issued as small-scale domestic poster in the form of a supplement to a special issue of the Courrier Français, January, 1895. Printed at the studio of Chaix – the Atelier Cheret. Courtesy of William Weston Gallery. http://www.williamweston.co.uk/pages/catalogues/single/171/28/1.html







4. Pierre Bonnard. Poster for La Revue Blanche. 1894.
Color lithograph, 58.7 x 78.2 (23 1/8 x 30 3/4). Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. http://www.nga.gov/feature/nouveau/teach/slide_03fs.htm







5. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Divan Japonais. 1893.
Lithograph poster, 31 5/8 x 23 7/8" (80.3 x 60.7 cm). Publisher: Édouard Fournier, Paris. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund. Édouard Fournier, owner of the Divan Japonais cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, commissioned this poster after redecorating the nightclub with Japanese motifs. Toulouse-Lautrec depicts two of his friends in the foreground, cancan dancer Jane Avril and art critic Édouard Dujardin, with singer Yvette Guilbert performing with her signature black gloves in the background. http://www.moma.org/collection/depts/prints_books/blowups/prints_books_001.html








6. Edgar Degas. l'Etoile ou Danseuse sur scène. 1876-1877.
Pastel, 0.058 x 0.042 cm. Courtesy of Musée d'Orsay, Paris. http://digilander.libero.it/webpainter2/degas/Star.jpg




[1] Alpers 2003.
[2] Schwartz 2004.
[3] Schwartz 1991.
[4] Orenstein, nd.

Reproduction: Limiting the Print Frenzy

By the end of Nineteenth Century, detractors decried the loss of exclusivity caused by the technological introductions of large print runs and photography. For the previous five hundred years in the West, collectors had been happy to snap up as many artist prints as could be produced, and artists happily adopted every new printing technology that enabled them to reach wider audiences for their work. That all changed with the introduction of limited editions, hand signed copies, and what artist Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) called the "brutal and barbarous matter" of cancelling plates [PLATE 14].[1]

Elizabeth Wyckoff, the New York Public Library's print specialist, credits French critic Phillippe Burty (1830-1890) with first conceiving and promoting the concept of "limited edition."[2] Burty is most famous for coining the term Japonisme in the 1870s, and for his early support of Impressionism. He was a founding member of the Société des Aquafortistes (Etcher's Society), which was set up in 1862 primarily to prevent photography from being accepted as art. Many influential artists joined the Aquafortistes and signed petitions against photography, including neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) [PLATE 15] and others.[3]

Print clubs that specialized in limited editions of high-quality fine-art prints began to appear throughout Europe and America, based on the model of the Société des Aquafortistes.[4] In the second half of the Twentieth Century, this European tradition led to the establishment of experimental print workshops such as Tatyana Grosman's Universal Limited Art Editions in 1957 (Bay Shore, Long Island), June Wayne's Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1960 (first in Los Angeles then Albuquerque), Ken Tyler's Gemini Graphics Editions Limited (Los Angeles then Tyler Graphics in Mount Kisco, NY and finally the Singapore Tyler Print Institute) [PLATE 16]. These master workshops were responsible for training a generation of fine art printers, spawning dozens of print shops throughout North America, developing incredibly innovative printmaking techniques, and publishing original and limited edition prints by the most famous names in Postwar American art. [5]

Yet the broader trends of Twentieth-Century cultural reproduction defied such refined limitation, and had immeasurably greater impact on the art world and the world at large.





1. James McNeill Whistler. Agnes. 1873/1878.
Etching, catalogue number: Kennedy 134, 225 x 150 mm (8 7/8" x 5 15/16"). This impression is taken from the cancelled plate & printed on laid paper with a high-crown watermark. Repaired one-inch tear in lower-left margin outside plate mark. Image size: 224x151mm. Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries. http://spaightwoodgalleries.com/Media/Whistler/Whistler_Agnes.jpg





2. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Odalisque. 1825.
Lithograph, 131 x 210 mm (5 3/16 x 8 1/4") plus margins. Delteil 9, only state. Published by Delpech in Album lithographique, 1826. Courtesy of R. E. Lewis & Daughter Gallery. http://www.relewis.com/ingres22big.html






3. Sidney B. Felsen. Daniel Buren at Gemini workshop. 1988.
Photograph. © Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California, 2001. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. http://www.nga.gov/gemini/88.024fs.htm



[1] Wyckoff 2000, p. 17.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Holbert 2004.
[4] Goddard 1998.
[5] Platzker 2000, p. 27.

Reproduction: Its Opposite is Extermination

The true heirs of Nineteenth-Century chromolithography were advertising [PLATE 17], propaganda [PLATE 18], and mass media. Limiting editions may nibble at the rarified edges of artistic reproduction, but propaganda and advertising destroy the very limits and possibilities of the technologies of reproduction. Any message or image—no matter how bland, bizarre, or brilliant—numbs with sufficient repetition, eliminating diversity, undermining the search for truth, exterminating alternative ideas, with lethal implications for life itself.

The Twentieth Century revealed extremes on both ends of the replication spectrum: expansionary tendencies and hegemonic message-making on the one hand, and authoritarian censorship and control of reproduction on the other. These forces proved capable of influencing and reshaping entire populations, prompting the First World War, the Russian Revolution, Hitler's final solution, nuclear war in Japan, China's one-child policy, and global ecological crises and species extinction. Reaction to the nightmare aspects of capitalism, fascism, and communism, including the manufacturing, media, and military methods behind them, provoked the dominant currents of Twentieth-Century art.

Modernism had a problem: signs of human, scientific, and technological progress were being contested violently throughout the world. Progressive modernists, with their roots in the Enlightenment and the Nineteenth-Century reaction to academic conservatives, were overtaken by a new avant garde that continues to dominate the art world in the Twenty-First Century. The postmodern challenge for visual artists remains: how to respond to the ubiquity of visual culture without retreating to the philosophical and sensory self-explorations of formalism and art for art's sake? Marshal McLuhan famously said, "advertising is the greatest art form of the Twentieth Century" [PLATE 19]. [1] In the Twenty-First Century, can art push reproduction technologies beyond mere commerce and ideology?






1. Procter & Gamble Co. I Thought I Was Doomed To Dull, Unattractive Hair Until I Tried Drene. 1937.
Kansas City Star. Courtesy of Duke University Ad*Access Project. http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/dynaweb/adaccess/beauty/hairprep1917-1939/@Generic__BookTextView/96






2. Mikhail Troitskii. Poema o Mashiniste (Poem about the machine operator). 1932.
Oformlenie Nikolaia Muratova. Leningrad: Leningradskoe oblasnoe izd-vo. Series: Biblioteka "Leninskikh iskr". 18 page, 19 cm. Agit-prop (a contraction of "agitatsiia" and "propaganda") was used in the Soviet Union after the Revolution to promote appropriate values among the masses, and included books such as Zubarev's Poema o mashiniste. Courtesy of McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections Division. http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/russian/agit.htm.





3. Coco Robot Studios. Che-Britney. ca. 1999-2002.
Street flyer used throughout Boston and New York Universities and city streets to promote the launch of trampt Magazine, designed as a series for the suck:now (subversive urban culture killing) f guerilla marketing campaign. The poster spoofs one of the world's most widely reproduced and merchandized images, the 1960 black-and-white photo of revolutionary Ché Guevara by the Cuban photographer known as "Korda" (Alberto Diaz Guttierez, 1928-2001). Courtesy of © coco robot studios, aka "cocoa robot studios" a division of Abuse The System, Inc., Boston, MA. http://www.cocorobot.com/print-design/flyer-poster/che-britney-spears/



[1] McLuhan, Marshall et al. 1996.

Reproduction: At the Core of Postmodernism

It is not surprising in this context that Marcel Duchamp's 1917 readymade entitled "Fountain" (a urinal signed R. Mutt) [PLATE 20] was recently named the most influential work of modern art in the world by a poll of 500 leading artists, curators, critics and dealers.[1] Dadaism, provoked by the mechanized slaughter of the "Great War", with its focus on the random reuse and parody of everyday visual signs, is widely claimed as the herald of conceptualism and postmodernism, two of the most omnipresent aspects of contemporary art at the start of the Twenty-First Century.[2]

Duchamp, a printmaker's grandson, was fascinated by replication, and much of his work challenges the importance of originality. Art historian Francis Naumann calls Duchamp "the first artist in this [sic] century consciously and systematically to reproduce his own work."[3]

While the survey undoubtedly has a British slant (it was commissioned by sponsors of the Turner Prize), the prominence of reproduction as a theme in the top-ranked Twentieth-Century work is noteworthy. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) [PLATE 21], comes in second place, with its appropriation of African masks [PLATE 22] and Ingres' Vénus Anadyomène [PLATE 23], foreshadowing Picasso's invention of collage and his cubist constructions, which in turn inspired Duchamp's readymades, and the rich lineage of formal exploration, improvisation, and abstraction that followed.

Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (1962) [PLATE 24] ranks third, with its fifty silk-screened repetitions of the glamorous actress's face, a work entirely about the relationship of reproduction to immortality, iconography, popularity, simulacra, and death. Also on the list are Joseph Beuys' I like America and America Likes Me (1974) [PLATE 25], Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1938) [PLATE 26], and Donald Judd's 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982-86) [PLATE 27], all of which feature reproduction as a key to their documentation, form, or concept (as political multiples, elegant clones, or minimalist repetition).

In another attempt to rank the significance of art works, University of Chicago economist David Galenson found Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) [PLATE 28] "to be not only the dominant American work of art of the late Twentieth Century, but the most important individual work produced by an American during the past 150 years."[4] His measure: the number of times the work has been reproduced in dozens of art textbooks published since 1990. The original Spiral Jetty has barely been seen by the public, not only because of its extreme remoteness in Utah, sixteen miles from the nearest paved road, but also because it has been submerged by the Great Salt Lake for many of the years since it was built. Awareness of Smithson's conceptual work and its significance to the history of art is entirely dependent on technologies of reproduction.

Twentieth-Century artistic strategies are replete with techniques centered on the reuse or reproduction of images: appropriation, assemblage, bricolage, collage, combines, detournement, montage, sampling, readymades. The most widely quoted postmodern philosophers and critical theorists, including Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Jameson, and Lyotard are fixated on reproduction as the central problematic of culture.[5] Many of the top-selling visual artists born after 1940 use reproduction as a key element of their artistic strategy, including Jeff Koons [PLATE 29], Jean-Michel Basquiat [PLATE 30], Felix Gonzalez-Torres [PLATE 31], Chuck Close [PLATE 32], Damien Hirst, Mark Tansey, and Takashi Murakami (in declining order of their highest auction prices, 2000 to 2003).[6] Reproduction is integral to broader measures of Georg Franck's "attention economy" which values any kind of creative work (scientific or artistic) based upon its ability to garner public and expert recognition.[7] This approach is associated with several other rankings of artistic value that date back to art historian Willi Bongard's influential Kunstcompass, which the German magazine Kapital began publishing in 1970. After Joseph Beuys became the first European artist to top its list in 1979, he made his now-famous quote: "Kunst = Kapital" (Art = Capital).[8]



1. Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. 1917.
Photo credit: Alfred Stieglitz. Reproduced in The Blind Man, No. 2, 1917, p. 4. Courtesy of Tout-Fait: the Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/Multimedia/Shearer/popup_09a.html



2. Pablo Ruiz Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907.
Oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8" (243.9 x 233.7 cm). © 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. http://www.moma.org/collection/depts/paint_sculpt/blowups/paint_sculpt_006.html



3. Nkanu Mask. nd.
Approximately 25" high without raffia. Courtesy of McCue Tribal Arts. http://www.mccuetribalart.com/masks/nkanu_mask.htm



4. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Venus Anadyomène. 1848.
Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. http://jllado.free.fr/images/Ingres_Venus_Anadyomene.jpg



5. Andy Warhol. Marilyn Diptych. 1962.
Silkscreen, ink/symthetic polymer paint on canvas, 2 panels each 208.3 x 144.8 cm. London: Tate Gallery. Courtesy of © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/ARS, NY. http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=15976&searchid=13980&tabview=image



6. Joseph Beuys. I like America and America likes Me. 1974.
Photograph by Caroline Tisdall of Beuys performance at René Block Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Joseph Beuys/ARS, NY. http://www.karlsruhe.de/Kultur/EKT/EKT2000/ekt1.htm



7. Constantin Brancusi. Endless Column. 1937-38.
Metal-coated cast-iron modules on a steel spine, height 98 feet, Târgu-Jiu, Romania. Restored and reassembled in 2000, conceived as a monument to young Romanians who died in World War I. http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/s/images/sculp_branc.endlss.lg.jpg




8. Donald Judd. 100 untitled works in mill aluminum. 1982-1986.
Installed in two former artillery sheds at the center of the Chinati Foundation's permanent collection in Marfus, Texas. http://chinati.org/english2/collection/judd_aluminum.htm




9. Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty. 1970.
Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water coil, 1500' long and 15' wide. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. Photographed by George Steinmetz, September 2002. Courtesy of the DIA Center for the Arts, New York. http://www.robertsmithson.com/earthworks/Spiral_Jetty_03.htm



10. Jeff Koons. Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank. 1985.
Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London. http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=21383&searchid=4384&tabview=image



11. Jean Michel Basquiat. Mona Lisa. nd.
Painting. http://www.postershop.com/Basquiat-Jean-Michel/Basquiat-Jean-Michel-Mona-Lisa-8800167.html%26Partnerid=2922



12. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Untitled (Perfect Lovers). 1987-1990.
Two commercial clocks, 14" x 27" x 1", courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery. http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Media/FelixGT/3BGclocks.jpg




13. David Adamson. Chuck Close Inkjet Self-Portrait Being Prepared. nd.
Photograph. (Assistant John Hughes in picture for final mounting) Courtesy of David Adamson, Adamson Editions. http://www.dpandi.com/adamson/



[1] Higgens 2004.
[2] Witcombe 1997.
[3] Naumann 1999.
[4] Galenson 2003.
[5] Barthes 1984; Baudrillard 1994; Deleuze 1994; Derrida 1987; Jameson 1991; Lyotard 1984.
[6] Artprice 2004b, p. XIII.
[7] Franck 1998.
[8] Rohr-Bongard 2004; Artfacts.net 2005.