I was encouraged to go and visit the Factum Arte booth at Masterpiece. It shows the work they are doing in the highest quality digital reproduction of major works of art. A putative Grinling Gibbons frame reproduced for Strawberry Hill:-
A head of Jacob Rothschild taken on a new technology called Veronica, which makes him look uncannily like the Emperor Claudius:-
The low relief carvings of a tombstone in Daghestan:-
There are those who are uncomfortable about the precision and accuracy which is made possible by digital reproduction. But it does allow records of the monuments now being destroyed or which are not easily available, as the Victorians understood:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
I’m intrigued about the implications of such high quality reproductions for our fetishistation of the original. What will it mean for museums and for individual works of art. Will they be valued (culturally and financially) more or less? What will matter more: the material object, or its associations?
Shrewd questions by Maurice Davies : yet another way in which Technology is changing the relationship between the artist and the public ? Something we haven’t yet taken fully on board, even after decades of mass reproduction, and the Internet ? A good subject for a future Rothschild Lecture ?
I agree – a new Benjamin view is called for. Thanks for the pics!