Chinese Sweatshops (Re)producing Fine Art Painting

Note the Mona Lisa smoking a joint in the corner. Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

 "Imitation is the sincerest form of Plagiarism" - Oscar Levant

Who of us hasn't at one time or another seriously considered a career in forgery? How many times have you thought "My kid can paint better than that"? We all know that those abstract paintings could be knocked off in no time, and the people who buy them couldn't tell a Vermeer from an anal wart [There's the typical arrogance of a forger for you].

But if I can't sell my copies as high-priced forgeries and am instead forced to make endless cut-rate copies in a down Economy then hey, I'll take what I can get for the most part.

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

A suburb of Shenzhen in China, Dafen is an entire village of reproduction painters. Established by businessman Huang Jiang, it sprang up in the '90s and grew from about 300 to 8,000 artists producing massive quantities of paintings for the Chinese Domestic and Global Art markets. The villagers sidestep questions of copyright by (mostly) copying paintings that are older than 50 years, and by not masquerading them as authentic works.

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

Of course, the term 'sweatshop' is heavily loaded. Images of foreign slave labor, children toiling on industrial looms and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire spring instantly to mind. Does it apply in the case of the Dafen painting studios? Painters do "work long hours for very low pay", but the focus of the World Media regarding Dafen has been the public's insatiable appetite for cheap knock-offs, not the working conditions of the painters themselves.

According to Der Spiegel, 29 year old Dafen artist Wu Han Wu "receives the equivalent of €0.30 per copied painting. That means he earns between €100 ($128) and €300 ($385) a month -- barely enough to cover his living expenses and send a little money home. But he doesn't complain: "It's much better in a workshop like this one, without a schedule."

Indeed, the article goes on to say that "the life Wu and his roommates live is not so different from that of the artists whose works they're copying, at least as far as their average day is concerned: They start painting around lunchtime and work until late at night."

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

We'd like to think of Art as being above Commerce, but everyone from the high-end galleries of Chelsea to the backrooms of Dafen is a slave to money. Dafen Artist Zao Xiaoyong alone estimates he's painted and sold more then 70,000 copies of Van Gogh, and the general estimate suggests that Dafen produces 60% of the World's oil paintings. That's a fascinating statistic, and signifies not only the Walmart-ization of Art production, but the deeply inherent desire of people to possess an 'original' oil painting. 'Painting is dead'? I don't think so.

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

John Berger drew on ideas from Walter Benjamin's 1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for his Ways of Seeing. Berger's point, which he made far more explicitly than Benjamin, is that the modern means of production have destroyed the authority of art: "For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free."

He argues that an Old Master's original physical context is essential for it's understanding, and that without it (as with the ubiquity of printed and painted copies) 'meaning' is destroyed. If you have a print of the Ghent Altarpiece hanging over your toilet, then you've removed that painting from it's context and thus killed it's power [I have a friend who hangs a black velvet painting of Karl Rove over her toilet, which somehow seems more appropriate]. Berger is trying to suggest that mass-produced copies are killing painting.

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

It's a market analysis that Mark Zuckerberg would disagree with: What's wrong with just spreading content globally? Van Loon would concur. In The Arts, he argued that "two or three really good reproductions of really good masters hanging in their own sitting rooms... would be much better for the artistic salvation of their souls than a dozen original Corregios tucked away in a corner of the local art museum (that nobody saw)." It's not a bad point, but he acknowledged that it corners him as "a busybody who probably imported his ideas from Moscow". [By the way: there is (no surprise) a Facebook page dedicated to boycotting these Chinese painting studios.]

The other question is whether these painters are actually any good. The answer is, you guessed it: Who cares?! If our bovine public wants a painting of a unicorn on a beach at sunset then I say give it to them. Komar and Melamid proved for once and for all that our Global public wants shlocky art. You can keep all yer high-falutin' big-city 'Concept' art for those East-Coast snobs.

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

But besides all that nonsense, Art studios have a long and well established history of serfdom and drudgery. There were Siennese sweatshops banging out repros way back in the 19th Century for all those Grand Tourists eager for a souvenir of the Old World. This is nothing new. Tourists in Ancient Rome could get copies of 'authentic relics' outside their fave ruins. I just made that up, but it could be true. I remember a notice advertising Shakespeare's skull for sale: Buy two and we'll throw in Shakespeare's skull as a child.

I bust my ass for billionaires and I still drive a 10 year old car. Am I bitter? Hell yeah!

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

As Meg Greene points out, "It commonly took years for apprentices to learn their craft. For the first year, they might do nothing more than observe others at work and clean up the studio at the end of the day. It might be another year or longer before an artist's apprentice would be entrusted with the responsibilities of mixing colors or helping to fashion a wax mold for the master. In time, the master would give the apprentice additional responsibilities and perhaps even assign him small commissions of his own to see how well he performed the work."

There's also an attitude these days among people (particularly among painters who are called Alan, and who are me), that hard work is to be avoided at all costs and should in fact be made illegal. We're shocked when we hear of people who actually have to work for a living.

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

Although Dafen artists can produce anything up to a mind-boggling 1,000 paintings per month, the output of any painting studio back in the day would rival that of Dafen. According to Pacheco, during the nine months that Rubens was in Madrid, without neglecting his important diplomatic affairs and in spite of suffering from gout, he painted a staggering amount of work. Get this:

"In the first place, he painted the king, queen and the infantas, half length, to take these canvases to Flanders; he made five portraits of his Majesty, one on horseback among the other grandiose figures )at Valencia). He then made a portrait of the Infanta de los Descalzos a little bigger than half length, and made of it several replicas.
"He executed five or six portraits of private individuals.
"He copied all the Titians in the possession of the King, to whit: The two baths of Diana and Europa, Venus and Adonis, Venus and Cupid, Adam and Eve, etc., and the portraits of the Landgrave, The Duke of Saxony, the Duke of Alba, of Cobas, a Doge of Venice, and many other paintings besides which the King possessed. He made a copy of the portrait of King Phillip in armor on foot. He made several changes in his painting the Adoration of the Magi, which was at the palace.
He also was commissioned to paint several paintings for private clients, up to two meters tall, and life-size portraits."

Here's the cursory wrap-up paragraph (I do actually have to get back to work): For better or worse, there's little point decrying Globalization, because for every one of us storming the barricades with 100% recycled placards there are 100,000 very industrious poor people eye-ing that Hope poster and thinking of ways to sell us a cheap knock-off.

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]

Photo credit: Jason Lee REUTERS [source]