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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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side note, whilst I get that destroying the Mona Lisa as a cultural artifact to get some revenge is an iffy message, I think the core idea that the Protag had been extensively and personally wronged by the villains and thus wouldn't give a damn about destroying a mere physical possession was completely valid. A human being was killed, and you're more outraged at the destruction of a tiny little portrait?

Death comes to all men, soon or late, but the good things we make can last much longer than any human, and can provide their goodness to many people across deep time. It is not a question of whether things are more valuable than people, but rather a question of how that value expresses itself. It is not unreasonable for a human to die to preserve an object, if that object is of great value to many others. Gratuitous destruction of such artifacts is one of the more telling marks of barbarism.

Well this gets into my other conversation on the topic.

If we care about the object for the good it provides other people, then surely the solution is to create an extremely convincing forgery and just... never disclose that the original was destroyed.

Much larger deceptions have been enacted throughout history for the purpose of maintaining the symbolic importance of a given relic or person.

And I don't think you would be able to convince the person with a dead sibling that she should refrain from violently enacting revenge on the killer even if it destroys a single cultural artifact... provided that it is the only real way to enact such vengeance.

I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable telling someone "no, your loss isn't great enough to justify destroying this cultural artifact just to hurt your sister's killer." Scale it up to something like, I dunno, The Sistine Chapel or the Statute of Liberty, where the true value is mostly bound up in the physical structure itself (and would be hard to recreate) and I start to agree.

At least part of this is due to the fact that a painting can be more easily 'replicated' than a building, especially one as meticulously studied as the Mona Lisa.

If we care about the object for the good it provides other people, then surely the solution is to create an extremely convincing forgery and just... never disclose that the original was destroyed.

Has this ever successfully been done? I mean, I suppose we wouldn't know, but I sort of doubt it. Trying to convince people to value the common heritage of humanity seems a more practical option, and if one could develop and deploy a system to make such forgeries practical, it seems to me that the most likely outcome would be corrosive skepticism in such artifacts, not the preservation of their value. We value the mona lisa because it was touched by the hand of a master, and has passed down through time to us in a way that leaves us confident that it is real. If you can fake such things, how do you keep the capacity for such fakery from becoming common knowledge? Is this one of those plans where you lie even harder to everyone who notices you're lying? Don't those plans involve losing your hat?

Has this ever successfully been done? I mean, I suppose we wouldn't know, but I sort of doubt it

For certain variants of 'successful.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoedler#Art_fraud_scandal_and_closure

https://www.insider.com/cases-of-faked-and-forged-artwork-2019-1

It seems entirely plausible that a single work, if faked convincingly enough, could probably be passed along for an indefinite amount of time without being noticed.

We value the Mona Lisa because it was touched by the hand of a master, and has passed down through time to us in a way that leaves us confident that it is real.

Interestingly, this starts to dovetail with the AI art debate. Do we care more about art that is actually the result of a human mind guiding human hands? Is that art more valuable?

I do think we can find more value in a work that has a traceable connection to our distant history, and that a version of the Mona Lisa that has, e.g. flecks of Leonardo Da Vinci's skin flakes in the ink from the painting process is more 'authentic' than a mostly-identical copy done by some other guy who is still alive.

On the other hand, I think that there are examples where fakery has even more drastic consequences, epistemic and otherwise, than merely replacing human artifacts that we are at least certain did exist at one point:

https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease

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