The exhibition sparked heated debate in the ensuing months, resulting in an attempt to have Dorner ousted from the International Association of Museum Directors and have it forbidden for copies to be made of original artworks. The public had to tell the originals from their copies. In 1929, Alexander Dorner, a museum director in Hannover, Germany, put on an exhibition entitled Original und Reproduktion in which 35 works on paper by renowned artists were displayed alongside facsimiles of the same size with identical frames. In other words, it is not a question of saying that reproductions have the same value as original paintings, but that there are ways of exhibiting them that may be worthwhile, and there is a poetic incorporation of reproducibility that it is important to discuss, especially at a time when market dynamics make it harder for artworks to circulate and when offering a high-quality visual reference could make sense in an exhibition setting, whether or not the original is present. Reproductions of historical paintings are another matter altogether, but at a certain point the debate about whether it made sense to use them was germane, since different ways of experiencing them could be valid even if they were not mutually equivalent. The aura lingers on in the most insidious way, with an insistence on the originality of the artist (but not necessarily the art).
Even at photography exhibitions there is a persistent fetish for valuing “vintage” prints, as if prints produced after the death of a photographer or without their supervision would make them worth less. In times like today, when any kind of materiality may be given the status of art, when there are ever more and ever better reproduction technologies and ever more means of transmitting digital images, clinging to the idea of an original work seems to me to serve little purpose, except for the art market and its inherent obsession with scarcity. Besides the value of reproductions, my interest in picking up on this proposal also has to do with the unceremonious way it desecrates the idea of originality, or rather, the way it belies the myth that originality is an essential precondition for artistic value and exhibition-worthiness. This inaugural exhibition was to have another section which I want to turn my attention to here, even if it is a complex parallel topic that has since become somewhat outdated: making amplified reproductions of famous paintings and exhibiting them alongside the original works. I was also keen to dig deeper into the original plans for MAM-SP and Duchamp’s role in them, especially in view of his understanding that American art could lend the abstract tradition in European modernism a fresh lease of life in the early post-war years. As I mentioned there, the inspiration for dealing with this subject came largely from my reading of Elena Filipovic’s book The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp. In my last article, I discussed some curatorial projects by Marcel Duchamp and his proposal, unrealized, for the first ever exhibition at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM-SP). Shifts in Reproducibility in Art: More on Duchamp
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