The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Abstract

The digitisation of images is a prerequisite for their dissemination on the Internet, to make them widely accessible. Due to their sheer number and pertinence, digital images and their derivatives can have a powerful effect on observers, which exceeds the impact of photography in the early 20th century. However, increased access to images may lead people to confuse the image with the object it represents, and there are indicators that digital technology might be one of the main reasons for this.There is anecdotal evidence that museum visitors believe that photographs in the museum shop do not represent the original painting due to their habituation to the widespread yellow‐tinted copies on the Internet. This raises the question of what happens if information technology provides perfect copies of originals: will this result in a ‘crisis of the original’ and a ‘culture of copies’ that could devalue the original? Is it possible that the aura of the original migrates to the perfect copy, as has been suggested for digital facsimiles of paintings?Using artificial intelligence, scientists worked on ‘The Next Rembrandt’, a project that created a typical Rembrandt based on the stylistic analysis of 346 portraits of the Dutch master that was printed with a high‐quality 3D printer. High‐quality digital reproductions or facsimiles raise the question of the long term effects on western museum canon, an effect that is potentially disruptive.