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Where can I see Hokusai's Great Wave today?

(greatwavetoday.com)
109 points colinprince | 2 comments | 09 Jul 25 03:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.012s | source
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sharkjacobs ◴[09 Jul 25 05:31 UTC] No.44506614[source]▶
What's the advantage of seeing an original piece of art over a serviceable replica? Especially in the case where the "original" is a print, one of dozens.

Obviously "serviceable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, a replica might simply not be very good, might not capture some vital characteristic of the thing which makes it a great work.

But otherwise, it's basically that the knowledge of how important and significant this work is puts the viewer in a more receptive frame of mind, right?

To be clear, that's not nothing. I of course know firsthand how much that affects the impact of a painting, museums and galleries care a lot about how they display their collection. But is that it?

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1. timr ◴[09 Jul 25 05:57 UTC] No.44506729[source]▶
> What's the advantage of seeing an original piece of art over a serviceable replica? Especially in the case where the "original" is a print, one of dozens.

And when you consider that "original" in woodblock prints is a Ship of Theseus thing -- over the years, prints have been made by different printers (frequently using different colors!), employed by different publishers, using blocks that have been re-carved by different craftspeople -- the "original", in any traditional sense, is only the painting made by Hokusai.

When you start diving into the world of collecting woodblock prints, you realize that "authenticity" is a subtle concept, and prices can differ by thousands of dollars (or far more) based on little more than a publisher's mark and/or the age of the paper. It's an area where encyclopedic knowledge really is required to understand exactly what you're looking at.

For example, you can easily find lots of "authentic" Hokusai prints in the <$1000 range (sometimes much lower), but these are all modern prints, done on re-carved blocks. Some of the cheapest have been done in the past 20 years.

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2. Muromec ◴[09 Jul 25 06:47 UTC] No.44506990[source]▶
Hokusai would want you to buy one of those 100 bucks re prints and get it on your wall to see.