Who Needs the Art Clones?

The brochure is slim, almost discreet, yet it has caused more anger in the art world than any book in recent memory. In gold capitals on a burgundy ground, its cover announces "The Nelson Rockefeller Collection." Inside it resembles--and is--a mail-order catalogue, with scores of lavishly shot objects. These range from an 18th century Chinese porcelain teapot stand ($65) to Age of Bronze, a nude youth by Rodin, at $7,500. Everything comes from Rockefeller's private collection--one of the most celebrated, public or private, in America. But everything is imitation. The Modigliani you can have for only $550 is just a glossy photograph. All the sculptures and ceramics are copies. Rocky still has the originals. "As life-long collectors of art ourselves," he writes in a "Dear Friend" preface to the catalogue, "Happy and I decided to share with others our joy of living with these beautiful objects and the thrills we have experienced collecting them." But it's frankly a business proposition: we share our art with you; you share your money with us. The people have no art? Then let them eat Cibachrome reproductions of Picassos at $850 each.

Last week Rockefeller's venture--partly, no doubt, because the name makes such an inviting target--provoked a furious attack from the Art Dealers Association of America, a group of 105 of the leading U.S. dealers. Though not known for its militancy in the past, and hardly opposed to the profit motive, this eminent body went for the jugular. Rocky's reproductions, it said, "are not works of fine art, have no intrinsic aesthetic worth and have little or no resale value." Having denounced this "shameful venture," the A.D.A.A. also called on museums to stop "making and selling pretentious reproductions." In reply, Rockefeller pointed out accurately that "I make no claims whatever for the investment value of my reproductions"--as well he might not. He went on to invoke the name of Andre Malraux, citing a passage in his writings that foresaw, in glowing terms, a "Museum Without Walls," by which all works of art would be diffused through reproduction as the common property of mankind, as orchestral music is disseminated through recordings. "I am surprised," Rockefeller added plaintively, "that the art dealers would launch such an unfair attack on a good customer."

Many of the Rockefeller offerings are china, candlesticks and reproductions of other domestic artifacts, which hardly deserve all the indignation. But the issue is wider, and this cat, once out of the bag, will not depart. The catalogue of costly, inauthentic art looks like a portent of the future: the Clone Museum, successor to the Museum Without Walls. A new cultural industry is rising: the mass production of elaborate, high-priced copies of art objects. They are not to be confused with ordinary, reasonably priced reproductions, including posters, postcards and photos, which are not only defensible but useful; the new products are "luxury" substitutes. The demand for them is a reult of the art boom of the '60s and '70s, when prices rose with dizzying speed and millions of Americans were indoctrinated in the belief that art meant status and investment as well as refinement. So everyone wanted a Picasso; demand for "blue chip" artists was always ahead of supply.

The first category of object whose market was utterly changed by this was the original print--etching, woodcut or lithograph, a strictly limited edition of an image made, supervised and signed by an artist. Some original prints became almost as costly as master paintings. But prints were not reproductions. Photos or postcards could not satisfy the thirst for status. They were not exclusive; they were, in fact, genuinely democratic. Anyone could pin a postcard of a Rembrandt on the wall, for pennies. Hence the invention of another class of object, a chimera begotten by greed upon insecurity: the expensive reproduction, in a nominally "limited" edition that can actually go as far as 100,000 copies or more. These clones are a strange breed. For the $7,500 Rockefeller's "Rodin" costs, anyone with an eye and some spirit could put together a few handsome original objects by excellent living artists--and have money left over for a week in Paris, spending every day at the Rodin Museum really learning something about a great sculptor.

But every clone finds its target unerringly among those who would rather do a lace-doily imitation of the Sun King of Pocantico Hills than risk "mistakes" by developing their own taste.

Why not make these reproductions? ask the defenders. Doesn't copying have a long history? Doesn't all we know of some lost Greek sculptures comes from Roman copies of the originals? Didn't Rubens copy Titian, and Delacroix Rubens, and so on down the history of art? Perfectly true: but in every case an artist was doing the copying and the result was another work of art. There is no relationship between the copies Rubens made, in the high humility of his mature age, in order to keep learning from Titian, and the mass production of plastic Egyptian lions by the merchandising division of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. There may not be much wrong with such knick-knacks--as long as they don't become substitutes, in people's minds, for the real thing. Mechanical reproduction clumsily mimics but cannot replace the intimate spontaneity and directness of an artist's touch. The clone trade is to real art and its audience what Franklin Mint medals are to numismatists, or vinyl-morocco Great Books to bibliophiles.

This fact has not been lost on American museums. Faced with mounting costs and unbalanced budgets, they depend more and more on selling clones. Last year the Metropolitan Museum--the greatest general museum in this country--grossed slightly under $16.8 million from its merchandising, no less than 44% of its gross income of $37.8 million. Its rush into reproduction selling began with its last director, Thomas Hoving, who has since set himself up in private business as "Director Emeritus" of the Met, pushing mail-order sales of a photomechanical reproduction of a painting by Andrew Wyeth--not an artist's print, neither signed nor numbered, with no announced limit on the edition, yet priced at a fancy $155 and carrying Hoving's imprimatur as an "investment."

The problem for museums is that, once committed to reproduction, they cannot easily back out. This in turn puts their fundamental duty to the public at risk. Museums have taken on many functions today. They are temples with the business problems of large corporations. They are arenas of education; they are also community centers and places of mass entertainment. But their one overriding job is still what it always was: to preserve and display significant works of art, in a secular framework and a historical matrix, in such a way that they can be seen and enjoyed for what they are and with the least possible ideological or commercial distraction. The authentic is always vulnerable--and the museum exists to defend it against a flood of inauthenticity. If a museum will not rigorously defend the difference between original works of art and copies, who will?

For the difference is crucial. Reproductions, however good, are no more works of art than a signpost is a view. Cheap ones are indispensable as memory aides, triggers of emotion, teaching tools, instruments of study. But the most perfect replication of a Donatello is not a Donatello; it is a mechanical derivative into which no trace of imagination or shaping will has entered. It is intrinsically dead, like a stuffed trout. To say this is not to argue for some snobbish mystique of rarity, but merely to state a fact about history: works of art have the same rights to their integrity and singleness as any other document. If an artist meant to make only one sculpture, his intention should be respected, not violated, by museums or collectors. We go to the original because it is a model of authentic experience. This authenticity cannot be copied with molds and router bits. It can only be re-created by other artists in other works, and re-experienced by the open eye, the inquiring mind. Millions flock to art museums every year in quest of this epiphany. There is nothing elitist about protecting their right to it against the simplifiers, copyists and hucksters who are trying to reduce it to the profitable inauthenticity of Williamsburg or Frontierland. When promotion and fake populism get together, their child is schlock. This time, the art dealers are right, and the buyer should beware. --Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.