There is no conspiracy.

[daphnep]

Okay, after a fair amount of interest in my "Improving Aphrodite" post from the other day, I made it public, and I'm happy to see so many people as piqued by the injustice to art and anatomy as I was

Comments

[esprix]

I don't buy the artist saying, "It doesn't look quite right" and adjusting. They're obviously using the original as reference, so how can they *not* see they're making it different?

Now, if you mean "doesn't quite look right" as in "doesn't quite look like what it should look like in today's market/based on what I see around me" regardless of their profit motive, then that I could believe; i.e., if it was subconscious. Similarly, if they were told by a dilettante of a boss that she was too fat and no one would buy her that way, I could believe that, too.

[daphnep]

They might be sort of using the original as reference. These aren't officially licensed reproductions. This is some guy/gal in China with no fine-art background, probably working from a postcard or jpeg of a sculpture which he/she will probably never see in his/her life. I'm gonna cut them some slack.

[esprix]

You're kind. :) But even just based on the side-by-side comparisons you posted - just one picture - the differences are astonishing. At some point these craftsmen had to have seen the original.

[daphnep]

How so? I've got way more "oh-la-la" over-qualification art history cred than many people in this business, and I've never seen the original Thorvaldsen Venus. If some company's flying all its staff over to Europe to check out artwork as a matter of course, I'm working for the wrong organization! ;D

[esprix]

Sorry, not seen the original in person, but rather seen the original in some form (i.e., photos). How else could they create a duplicate of it? And seeing that photo of the original compared with what they created, they'd have to be blind not to see the differences (and if they're blind, they couldn't have made it in the first place, but now I'm just being silly!). :)

[daphnep]

Yeah, they're pretty crappy reproductions in every way. That's why it seems a case of incompetence, rather than malice.