When priceless works of art are stolen from the great galleries of the world’s major cultural centers, the people go wild, the media amuse themselves and the prophets proclaim the end of the world, the four horsemen return and Tom eats himself. to Jerry. But when they make the announcement on the news, they have a digitally rendered trillion trillion pixel perfect copy behind them. Why are originals so valuable when everyone and their dog can have the same image printed and wallpapered in their downstairs bathroom?

Photography

Perhaps before the invention of the camera and the printing press, a painting could be justified as something valuable, since there would be no other way to record that priceless moment when an orange sat in the same bowl as an apple and a banana. But with a photograph you can take a picture of a painting or the scene itself, capturing every detail. Surely this should take some value from the original representation.

replicas

Criminals being criminals, they have delved into the art world with reckless abandon, bringing with them zealous art students, aspiring teachers, and copycats alike. His abilities can be used to copy, stroke by stroke, old and new paintings so that his version has all the qualities an original has. Surely if you had no way of knowing this wasn’t the original, what happens to its value? should go down right?

Volume

Art is big business. There are millions and millions of paintings out there. One hundred thousand million bowls of fruit, one billion half-naked women, many old men on horseback, and quite a large number of blue squares next to red triangles. With new artists coming out of art colleges every day, all with their own stuff to add to the art melting pot, why do some paintings command million-pound price tags, while budding artists who can barely afford the drawing inks cannot stick their images on a bus stop without the light from the town hall washing it over. The sheer volume of art should surely drive the price of art down. It’s basic economics. Why, why, why?

Pure exclusivity is the answer. Owning the original version of a painting by a great master like ‘Renoir’ or ‘Monet’ is like having the only copy of a part of his soul. The fact that a painting is so well known and endlessly copied adds to the individuality of owning the original. That’s why, when an artist dies, his work is suddenly worth much more: because they can’t do originals anymore. Art will always be expensive because it’s something so personal and emotional, and especially if it’s by someone famous.