Samiul Bashar Samin
Our fascination with visiting museums draws on the cult of adulation for the unique work of art, as explored by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. We want an authentic encounter as opposed to the experience of gazing at reproductions in books. It’s the reason art-lovers build trips abroad around certain galleries, never mind that an artwork might be the product of many hands, created in the studio system in which a master such as Rembrandt or Rubens might have a dozen or more assistants and apprentices at work on any given painting. The outcry is enormous each time conspiracy theorists claim that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503-06), on display at the Louvre, is in fact a copy, with the original squirreled away for safekeeping – and it would be a scandal of epic proportions if that were true.
Visitors expect a reverberant experience when confronting an original masterpiece. The iconic nature of the work offers them a communion with history, a sense of time-travel, and elicits a reverence akin to that felt by spiritual pilgrims who finally get to kneel before a religious relic. Museum-goers are on artistic pilgrimage, happy to encounter new treasures, but they set out to experience the ‘must-sees’. There is also an element of celebrity-spotting in play. When I see a work of art that I recognize from the textbooks but have never viewed in person, I get an endorphin rush of recognition. Imagine the disappointment if a celebrity-spotter thinks she’s spied David Beckham, only to realize it’s just a lookalike. Yet a parallel to this rather quotidian example occurs regularly in museums the world over, and no one seems to mind. Or rather, almost no one seems to notice.
With such moral weight given to the responsibility not to mislead, it seems odd that major museums should display reproductions without making it clear that they were not originals. As Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of art history at the University of Oxford, explained: ‘There are obvious conservation problems in showing graphics. I don’t in principle mind facsimiles being shown if there is total and visible honesty about what visitors are seeing.’ Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, a curator at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, agreed: ‘It is standard practice to note on an object label that a reproduction has replaced an original object. This happens often – as drawings are frequently displayed for a duration of three months and then must rest again in storage. Since many special exhibitions run longer, drawings need to be taken off view in midstream. For example, at the recent Carlo Dolci show in Florence, the labels indicated when a drawing had been replaced with a reproduction by simply stating “reproduction”.’
The nightmare parallel, in the art world, is that future generations would suffice themselves with reproductions of masterpieces (the ‘maps’) and neglect to visit, or neglect to maintain, the precious, unique originals. It is the duty of museums to make clear when originals have been substituted for reproductions, to use reproductions didactically and overtly when they offer advantages, but to always maintain the primacy and underscore the irreproducible nature of the original.