People love Vincent van Gogh’s art and general aesthetic more than the man himself. For as long as I can remember Van Gogh’s art has been everywhere. From the art prints in my parent’s house to coffee mugs being bought in stores. There is a general appreciation of the man’s art and an almost endless lore around him. Van Gogh fits many tropes people seek in artists; sad, lonely, a misunderstood genius, and dead.
Born on 30 March 1853, Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter. His art is widely recognizable and circulated and is flourishing beyond the art world and can be found in various aspects of life and among different walks of people. As a young man van Gogh was an amateur artist; very much involved in the art-making process but not yet willing or wanting to sell his work. Van Gogh saw art as something that was deeply humanizing and internal, because of this he was less concerned about the value of each painting he produced and was more interested in relishing in the beauty and the organic nature of his creations.[1] This mentality led Van Gogh away from the cities, the galleries, and the people who attended them. Instead, he found himself in the countryside among people who saw “dignity in their labour[2]” and among “civilized peoples.[3]” In Vincent van Gogh by Tony McKenna, the author discusses the political awakening of Vincent van Gogh and his attitude towards capitalism and the state of art.
“Vincent’s growing political awareness was saturated with socialist elements. Above all, it involved an identification with the oppressed. However, it was an abstract awareness… Van Gogh felt and intuited many of the problems a capitalist economy posed but at the same time he had no political education, he had no contact with any developing political movements, and was therefore entirely without the means for arriving at concrete political conclusions. His political sense was deeply felt but also nebulous and highly emotive for he had not inherited any political traditions. He had, though, gained certain religious ones and in religion, his developing political instincts found confused but profound expression.[4]”
Van Gogh’s idealization of rural living, according to McKenna, inspired much of his early work and his attitude towards art as a whole. This attitude also evolved the style of art that he was making. During this time, Van Gogh was more concerned with the feeling of life and people and less about realism and accurate portrayals.
“The separation between subject and object, between human being and the environment he or she inhabits is, to some degree annulled by the pastose graduation of yellows, greys and blacks. In these depictions, Van Gogh is expressing the strenuousness of peasant life for certain, but most importantly he is showing us its unity, its completeness, and its dignity.[5]”
This idea stuck with Van Gogh throughout his life and despite his place of residence, his feeling towards art and the true meaning of it remained as a theme of his works. He sought to show his view of reality and how the people interacted and interpreted life.
In understanding the origin and meaning of Van Gogh’s art, it is almost tragic to see where his art is now and how it has been commodified and voided of its meaning. This is a theme throughout and media in general but seems especially prevalent and overblown when it comes to Van Gogh and his works. In The Commodity by Karl Marx, both the idea of value and labour are discussed. This paper will look at the idea of reproductions of art and how that plays into the idea of the commodity and how it relates to the original creation. This paper will investigate the question of reproductions being art on their own merits and whether they are valued accordingly.
The first sentence in Marx’s The Commodity sums up the main theme of this paper and its attitude towards the idea of art as a commodity; “The wealth of societies in which a capitalistic mode of production prevails appears as a “gigantic collection of commodities” and the singular commodity appears as the elementary form of wealth.[6]” Arts primary purpose, to some, is to be collected. This makes art more of a number than it is a painting. Among Marx’s scholars of art history, there is an overarching question of whether art can be completely separated from its inherent value and devoid of the capitalist mentalities that come after its creation.[7] There are also questions about how artists get paid for their works, is it compensation for their labour or the perceived value of the art as a finished product?[8] These questions and notions not only feed into the capitalistic systems that surround art but also beg the question as to what is considered labour, how it gets valued and who decides the value?
In her book, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade, Winnie Wong looks at the industry and the people behind reproduction paintings. The book describes that all the artists who paint in these factories are completely erased from the final product.[9] China as a country is not even in the picture when it comes to the resale of these paintings with ownership and authorship being attributed to others outside of China. These factories are not a new thing, with Chinese oil painting factories dating back to the late 1700s. Wong describes that in 1848 there were between two to three thousand painters being employed to produce oil and watercolor paintings for the global market in Guangzhou city alone.[10] Tourists would visit these factories to have reproductions, portraits, or original paintings created for them by essentially nameless Chinese artists.
Many of these factories still exist today and many are the leading producers of oil painting reproductions. The primary focus of her book is on Dafen Village in Shenzhen China. Opening in 1989, the factory employs thousands of painters and produces replicas of various famous works, including those of Van Gogh. In the book, Wong, calls this relationship with art and labour as the “industrialization of art.[11]” Wong continues,
“How the dystopic imaginary of factory and of assembly line painting operates to value work in Dafen, to produce and reproduce authorial and anonymous subjects, and to both limit and influence change forms the basis of Dafen artists’ ability to engage with the global art world.[12]”
Marx’s theory of The Commodity is central to understanding not only economic exchanges but also the capitalist mode of production. He extends this idea further to look at the labour involved in fulfilling the system. Marx sees that all commodities are bounded by human labour and sees that as instilling value within things. The true value of the commodity is evaluated at the point of exchanging of goods. Marx defines two types of labour in his work. The first is concrete labour (the physical work; hammering, painting, etc.) and the second is abstract labour (the differences between two objects in an exchange and how labour differs in making the two).[13]
When looking at the factories found in Wong’s book, there is a clear question about labour and its contribution to art. The employment structures within the factories themselves denote a sense of exploitation and contribute to this idea of “commodified urban labour.[14]” The bosses of the factories are the ones that see the glory and fame of producing high-quality replicas which further buries the original painter’s labour and skills.[15] The labour or work being put into these paintings is not proportionate in the final exchange when the painting goes to the buyer. Despite being replicas there is still a degree of engagement between art and patron that occurs. The engagement that occurs is never fully free of labour and the systems of capitalism allow it to fly under the radar.[16] People who look at replicas of art are likely to not be privy to either the artist who painted the original or the person who painted the reproduction.
In Chapter 4 of her book, Wong lays out the 18 steps used to paint Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.[17] They are steps that painters at Dafen are told to follow religiously to ensure the perfect Van Gogh sunflower. They are told at the same time to reject many of the classical art techniques they were previously taught to allow for the organic and free-flowing nature of Van Gogh’s paintings.[18] Sunflowers is a very iconic painting by Van Gogh and is not only widely recognizable it is also highly in demand. Sunflowers, a series of painting between 1888 and 1889 were painted during Van Gogh’s time in Arles. The painting series in and of itself is a type of reproduction. With the same painting being reproduced several times over. According to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam the series and duplicates “demonstrated that it was possible to create an image with numerous variations of a single colour, without any loss of eloquence.[19]” This type of reproduction, an artist making different copies of their work, is inherently different than factories producing thousands of reproductions a year as the original artist still has a say in the final product. They knew what went into the original and were able to make each painting their distinct piece of art. Factories would have a hard time doing the same thing and create something more akin to shells of the original.
When it comes to reproductions, Van Gogh has always been at the centre and a best seller. This is to the extent that many reproduction factories could run solely reproducing Van Gogh’s paintings.[20] Despite this, however, at Dafen, the van Gogh painter is considered the lowest-skilled, and therefore earn among the lowest rates.[21] This creates a stark contrast between the perceived value of the painting and the value of the labour that goes into making it.
In the article, The Popularization of Art and the Independence of Art in the Process of Commercialization, Junzhong Zhao outlines the advantages and disadvantages of the commercialization of art. Some advantages are that artists can make money off of their art, art can be circulated more efficiently and broadly, art becomes accessible and more people can look at art.[22] Some disadvantages include; art loses its sacred nature and emotional resonance, all new art created will be inherently commodified, and art ceases to be made for art’s sake.[23] It appears that more of the disadvantages are prevalent when it comes to reproductions, especially those of Van Gogh. The price of modern art fails to reflect the labour that goes into creating it.[24] This is the case with classics, contemporary art, and reproductions.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin is a paper that discusses the mechanical reproduction of art and how it pertains to the uniqueness and production of art. In the reading, Benjamin discusses the idea of an “aura” and how that pertains to art, reproductions, and value. He explains that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.[25]” Using this outline, a reproduction will always be inferior to that of the original. Benjamin, when writing this was discussing the validity of photography as a medium but there is some degree of crossover when it comes to physical oil painting reproductions. Reproductions are what they say they are, not the original, and thus lack much of the same “aura” as the original. The fact that the original article is the first, marks it as the source of all that follows it. The original of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers is the painting that all other sunflowers will precede. Reproductions may hope to achieve all of the essence found within Sunflowers but will only be able to capture fragments of what went into it.
This sentiment is at odds with that of Marx as he sees the labour that went into the final product as being the most important and not the final product. Itself. In her book, Wong describes this dichotomy between labour and art and how it applies to reproductions; “Modern art can thus be considered as a form of art production that emerges out of a dichotomization and redichotomization of craft, but with the implicit tracking of both art’s and craft’s removal from industrial mass production.[26]” This contrasts the industry of art with the industry of reproduction (through mass production). As established, it’s hard to differentiate between art and the systems of capitalism, but Wong’s explanation allows for art to still exist in the realm of creativity while also being different then industrialism and mass production.
Wong ends her book with the idea that the industrialization complex will forever loom over art.[27] This is a sad and almost dystopian sentiment but rings true especially when looking at the almost stockbroker environment of current day art. Reproductions should not be a substitute for the real thing, and they should not be created at the expense of the artist, both original and new.
Bibliography
1867, Marx. “The Commodity by Marx 1867.” Marxists.org, 2020. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2008.
Brouillette, Sarah. “On Art and ‘Real Subsumption.’” Mediations 29, no. 2 (2016): 169–76. https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/on-art-and-real-subsumption.
McKenna, Tony. “Vincent van Gogh.” Critique 39, no. 2 (April 11, 2011): 295–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2011.561634.
Won, Winnie. Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. University Of Chicago Press, 2014.
Zhao, Junzhong. “The Popularization of Art and the Independence of Art in the Process of Commercialization.” The Educational Review 6, no. 8 (August 29, 2022): 413–18. https://doi.org/10.26855/er.2022.08.013.
[1] Tony McKenna, “Vincent van Gogh,” Critique 39, no. 2 (April 11, 2011): 295–303, https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2011.561634. 297
[2] Ibid. 298
[3] Ibid. 298
[4] Ibid .299
[5] Tony McKenna, “Vincent van Gogh,” Critique 39, no. 2 (April 11, 2011): 295–303, https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2011.561634. 299
[6] Marx 1867, “The Commodity by Marx 1867,” Marxists.org, 2020, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm.
[7] Sarah Brouillette, “On Art and ‘Real Subsumption,’” Mediations 29, no. 2 (2016): 169–76., https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/on-art-and-real-subsumption. 169
[8] Ibid. 170
[9] Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. (University Of Chicago Press, 2014). 7
[10] Ibid. 36
[11] Ibid. 38
[12] Ibid. 38
[13] Marx 1867, “The Commodity by Marx 1867,” Marxists.org, 2020, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm.
[14] Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. (University Of Chicago Press, 2014). 46
[15] Ibid. 48-50
[16] Sarah Brouillette, “On Art and ‘Real Subsumption,’” Mediations 29, no. 2 (2016): 169–76., https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/on-art-and-real-subsumption. 173
[17] Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. (University Of Chicago Press, 2014). 147
[18] Ibid. 149
[20] Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. (University Of Chicago Press, 2014). 156
[21] Ibid. 160
[22] Junzhong Zhao, “The Popularization of Art and the Independence of Art in the Process of Commercialization,” The Educational Review 6, no. 8 (August 29, 2022): 413–18., https://doi.org/10.26855/er.2022.08.013. 414
[23] Ibid. 414
[24] Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. (University Of Chicago Press, 2014). 162
[25] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2008). 21
[26] Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. (University Of Chicago Press, 2014). 164
[27] Ibid. 238
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