Tuesday, October 01, 2013

"If They Replaced Detroit's Art Treasures with Fakes, Would Anyone be Able to Tell?"

In The New Republic, Michael Kinsley says:

"By not thinking outside the box, Detroit is losing an ideal opportunity to test a suggestion made three decades ago by a curmudgeonly Harvard political scientist named Edward Banfield. Banfield wrote a book called The Democratic Muse, in which he proposed that paintings and sculptures in public museums be sold and replaced by high-quality reproductions. Most museum visitors, he argued, couldn’t tell the difference ... and thus would get the same experience from the fakes as they would from the originals."

Christopher Knight is not amused.