Man as Matrix
With China in the news, I was reminded of a story the NYTimes did a while back about the town of Dafen (near Hong Kong), also called the village of ten thousand painters. Like human printing presses, artisans are trained to reproduce masterworks at a rate of up to 30 paintings a day. From Shanghai-Central.com…
Approximately five million oil paintings are manufactured in Dafen annually created by roughly 8000 to 10,000 painters, each year a few hundred join the “club” also a lot of real artists are moving to the village every year, here they can have continuous income. About 10% of the paintings created are done only by the creativity of the artist, no copy work.
By the end of the year a private art school is planned to raise new talents, actually for this kind of art not much talent is needed.
From the NY Times article…
One advantage of the larger operations is that they allow specialization, with simple assembly lines like those that Henry Ford brought to the automobile industry.
Repetition isn’t printmaking, but printmaking is repetition, right? I love the image of the room full of easels with the same painting.
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Aw, Man! I was totally saving this same content for a slow day!
…I actually have more to add when I’m not at work. May need to do a Part II.