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

[stachybotrys]

Something I've been thinking about since your initial post about this is that it seems like a lot of us tend to forget that the original pieces didn't represent stark reality either, but were idealizations that were marketable in their time. It's easy to forget because the reproductions are so badly done and flat out unattractive, but the real world that was contemporary to the original works was most likely not populated by people who looked like those represented any more than the stretched and bobble-headed reproductions look like the majority of the people walking around today. It's not a new phenomenon.

[daphnep]

Huh. You're right. Botticelli's female neighbors were probably all gossiping "have you seen those hips and those boneless, elegant hands? What an outrage!"

Ha. I love that.

[merimask]

Hi! Followed a link to your first entry & hence, here

[daphnep]

Thank you. I think one of the details that makes a difference here is that it wasn't a magazine per se, it was a wholesale, "to-the-trade" industry catalogIt's an advertisement, like, "hey, if your customers are interested in art, you might be interested in what we have to offer." And I (and I presume others in my position who DO have fine art backgrounds and who also DO know a little bit about female anatomy) are free to say "no thank you". Which I did. And I thought the models were funny, because they were so pathetic and so poor in the full context of "products I can buy for my fine-art-loving customers". I think it's terribly sad if that were to be the only experience with Botticelli a person would ever have, and I think it's a sad indicator of what people (and businesses) expect Americans to want to buy, these days

[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

[zellion]

Sorry, but after reading books like "The Beauty Myth" I believe there *is* a conspiracy, it's just not one being thought up by people who do art reproductions. I agree that this company in question is just caught up in the larger issue like the rest of us.

[daphnep]

Oh, good! So you know, too, that it's a "conspiracy" with which we are complicit every time we buy into it with our own money, and that the "conspiracy" is funded by the money we freely give up to it.

It does tend to make shopping hard...but conscious consumers are damn good consumers, IMO.

[primad]

Coming here after seeing (and not commenting on) the original post, I was struck by how overall the reproductions weren't like the originals in general (aside: especially the Thorvaldsen Venus), considering that they were in a magazine devoted to fine art reproductions.

My question, my first guess based on what you said in the original post was that the primary market would be supplying museums' gift shops but would the market for these pieces really be outdoor cart vendors seperate from the official venues? Because this reminded me much of the plastic version of The Pietà my grandmother had that she likely picked up from a shrine gift shop. I never thought it was meant to be "high art" but she was very proud of it despite it only having a passing appearance to the original.

[daphnep]

Yes, exactly, on all of it. (It was a catalog, not a magazine...but you're right). It's not high art, it's exactly like your grandmother's figurine.

It's a poorly-done reproduction, but that's all.

[primad]

It's a poorly-done reproduction, but that's all.

Yeah, that's why I had a hard time mustering up the outrage for this particular issue (unlike say, the Spiderman MJ statue which was obnoxious and deliberately so) because odds are is these were folks who had likely been making mediocre resin Buddhavistas for Walmart shoppers' faux asian gardens and the crappy current global market is sending them off to try to find where they can make money (read: "Hey! I hear those art museum goers have money! Let's try there!") with no understanding of what makes the originals artOdds are they're gonna end up at a place like Big Lots because the company that made them misjudged the western art reproduction market (decent representations of neoclassical sculpture, they're not). I'm not sure they'll learn a lesson on female body image issues when the poor person who made it probably earned all of 15 cents for a day's work

[daphnep]

Thank you, thank you, thank you for both getting it and saying it so well.

Now, I'm off to read about that Mary Jane doll, because that looks like a fascinating comparison with a lot of other interesting food for though.