Limited editions

Barnes on Thames, 2018

This morning I received an email advertising the work of one Rian Hotton, a gentleman I had not previously heard of, but Microsoft and Google between them must have made some link between us. A chap well known to Bing, to Facebook and to Saatchi art. He appears to live in Dulwich.

The limited edition giclée print above, around half a metre high, can be had for £210. With giclée, according to reference 2, being a fancy word to describe using an ink-jet printer to produce a printed image from a digital image. Price of the original art work itself, in this case oil on plywood, on application.

All of which caused me to ponder about the whole rather odd business of limited editions. Some things are expensive because they are rare, things like lumps of gold or diamonds. It takes a lot of work to find them.

Other things are expensive because it takes a lot of highly skilled work to produce them, things like old master paintings.

And then someone invented the woodcut, a device for pulling hundreds if not thousands of prints from a single work or art, a single block of wood. In the beginning, I don't suppose there was any nonsense about limited editions. An affordable product to grace the houses of the emerging middle classes.

Limited editions came later when collecting became an activity in its own right. Also with the tax people ruling, as I recall, that you were supposed to deface your block of wood after 75 prints had been taken, otherwise you would have to start paying VAT on the sales. In any event, the customer wanted his bit of art to have scarcity value. You didn't want Mabel next door to have the same picture above her gas fire as you did. And you did want to be able to make snide remarks about Mabel's poor taste. I suppose ladies know all about this sort of thing in the important matter of their clothes.

So art was no longer art for art's sake. Something else was going on; perhaps rather than a thing, it had become a process, a process whereby the owner of the thing acquired status, much more important than art. And we have now got to the point where the thing itself need have little intrinsic value, provided the producer of the thing can successfully inject it into the social scene, where it will acquire value by being valued. All very circular. All very 'Emperor's New Clothes'. For which see reference 4.

Perhaps I should have been a parson.

Reference 1: https://www.rianhotton.com/.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gicl%C3%A9e.

Reference 3: https://andersen.sdu.dk/. A site which seems to be a little creaky.

Reference 4: https://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html.