The Value of Scarcity in the Age of Ubiquity
This is the future:Just when digital reproduction makes it possible to create a “Rembrandt” good enough to fool the eye, the “real” Rembrandt becomes more expensive than ever. Why? Because the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.
(Via Boing Boing.)
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2 comments:
The 'real' Rembrandt? A Rembrandt product, not the work of a living man: Rembrandt the artist studied with a mentor who was busy with commissions and lived the life of a professional artist until his unique ('scarce') interpretations of popular genres drove him to bankruptcy. We have spent five hundred years putting together a framework in which we are clear how artists are funded through distribution channels - church, merchants, guilds, families, weddings, adverts, newspapers etc. - and now those canals prove to be as flexible as run-offs from flood plains. Artists are artists and need help with distribution - that's not how they became good artists. To suggest that they change their behaviour to fit the new model is to get into economist mode, where human behaviour somehow keeps failing to optimise opportunities!
Well, I don't know that it is such a change of behaviour. Most artists have to be self-promoters, which is perilously close to marketing. For example, as a writer, I've had to contact agents, publishers and the rest in a desperate attempt to "sell" my ideas. There is no such thing as a "pure" artist that just creates.
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