Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 painting The Starry Night, owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is, at a billion dollars, the most expensive painting in the world. But in Dafen, in China’s Guangdong Province, you can pick up a hand-painted copy for as little as 40 dollars.
Sometimes, of course, a copy is truly terrible. It mucks up the details, it gets proportions weirdly wrong. But not always; in many cases, you couldn’t tell it apart from the original unless you used a microscope.
But still our cultural industries sneer. However, this has everything to do with their mercantile need to preserve the value of their assets and nothing to do with our own interior benefit. When we are told that art inherently belongs in galleries, we are being condemned to encountering works only at times dictated by museum schedules, which means that we miss out on most of what art can actually do for us.
We hardly ever get enraged and want to curse in MoMA, so we’re unlikely ever to have direct need of Van Gogh’s immensely calming nocturnal vista when we see it. The place we really need those stars and that swirling moon is in the kitchen or the bathroom at home after a long day, the places where we shout at the children and say things we shouldn’t to our spouse.
Artworks have therapeutic power that passes us by not because we are insensitive or unworthy, but for a more basic reason: their messages hit us at the wrong time, at moments when we’ve no need of them, like adverts for winter coats on the first day of spring.
Copying is the much-needed solution, because it allows us to place important, beneficial images in exactly the places where we need them. We are negative about copying because we’re not so sure what we really want from art. The real point of art isn’t to do with enriching owners; it is to help us lead our lives more wisely and with greater poise. Once we recognise this great and practical purpose, we become less bothered by the difference between an original and a copy because we can accept that a copy – even one in a book – will be just as effective at getting us through till morning.
