The washington post ran a
story last week about the role that context plays in aesthetics. In the article, Joshua Bell, a famous violinist, played his Stradivarius violin in a subway station during rush hour. He played for an hour, over a thousand people walked by, less than 30 stopped, and he made less than $40.
What I find fascinating about this story isn't so much that no one stopped, its that the context in which something is presented plays a huge role in our appreciation of that thing--in fact, it probably plays a bigger role than even the thing itself. The most clear-cut example of this I can think of is forgeries of famous paintings. It is to the point now that forgers are so good at mimicking the originals--copying brush strokes, replicating paint, even simulating aging, that we have to use the most sensitive
measurements available to tell the difference between a fake and an original. The human eye can't see these differences--you need things like scanning electron microscopes.
Given that I never intend to look at a Picasso under a scanning electron microscope, I guess this begs the question: why do we care if its a fake? If a fake is really so nearly identical to the original, why wouldn't I like the fake as much? In fact, much like the philosophical problem of
thesius' ship, I could imagine some contexts where a fake might be more real than an original that has been restored.
So why this attachment to the original? The answer, of course, is the "
provenance," the story we are told about this piece of art; its the context. Its actually the provenance that a forger is trying to steal when she presents a fraud for sale, because that is actually what art collectors are buying when they pay $30 million for a Picasso. If all they wanted was the image of the painting, they could get a print for significantly less. They actually want a link to the artist, to be able be part of a causal chain going from themselves back to the moments in which Picasso first started putting paint to canvas in
Guernica. Everything else--the paint, the canvas, the brushes, are replicatable. It is the story, the context that is unique and worth the money.
But given this, it truly is remarkable to think that $30 million for a painting isn't buying the object. It buys the story. But then again, maybe it isn't so weird. After all, in computers, for example, the hardware is almost never worth as much as the software in it.
