The piece I picked is on a brick wall visible from the High Line. It is a face in white spray paint, no plaque, no signature, no artist I could find. Under the chin it says YOUNG VEEZY, and someone else tagged ADEK further down the same wall. Nobody curated or approved any of it, probably.
Could it be replicated the way a painting can? It’s complicated.
We said in class that even paintings are hard to replicate. A print flattens the brushwork, and you would need something like a 3D scan and printer to lay the paint back down at the right depth. This is harder. The paint seeped into the brick unevenly and the mortar lines create a grid across the face. That grid is now a part of the mural. To copy the mural you would have to copy the wall.
Berger says images, like paintings, used to be made for one specific building, like a church, and its original meaning was tied to that unique place. He also said that the invention of the camera broke that by turning art into something portable and sellable, destroying their original meaning, but now allows the art to mean many different things. This piece undoes that. It cannot be moved, sold, or authenticated, but it still suffers from all the issues that the camera introduced. Yet the mural exists in one place, illegally, (again) probably.
My photo keeps the composition and the lettering. It loses the texture and the grit. It freezes the light, since the wall will read differently at 1 PM than it does at 9 PM. It loses everything around it too, the foreground of the High Line itself, the other commissioned artwork in the space, etc. Standing on the High Line, you see sanctioned and unsanctioned art in the same line of sight. Cropped into a photo, that comparison disappears.
Here is where Berger’s idea potentially fails. He assumes the original stays put and the copy travels. Graffiti gets buffed, painted over, or torn down with the building, the paint is already fading away. In a few years my photo may be the only version left. With a painting in a museum, the reproduction sends you back to the original. With this, it eventually replaces it.
