> This means that if these prints are displayed for three months at 50 lux, they should be stored in the dark for at least a year before they are displayed again
> While these measures will not stop fading from occurring altogether, they will ensure that these world-famous prints fade so slowly that they will be seen by countless generations of visitors to the Museum in the future.
This trade-off is interesting, are we maximizing for number of people watching works? Or are we purely maximizing time? Because its not obvious to me that more people will see a work if it lasts 1000 more years but spends 80% of that time in storage, vs lasting 100 more years spending 0% of the time in storage.
Also lets say you go to the museum today and are lucky that it happens to be on display. But your friend travels to see it, it happens to be in 80% storage time, then the friend goes back home and dies without seeing it so that some future person that doesn't exist yet even can see it later without fading. Why is the future person more important than the current person, in a sense?
Storing it assumes a lot, that humanity will survive, that people will be interested in seeing it, that some fire isn't going to destroy their storage, etc. Meanwhile real life people would've seen it already. I don't have an answer, just questions though.
pm215 · 6m ago
I think another aspect here is that museums don't have infinite display space. So if famous items X, Y and Z are on permanent display that's less space available for other, less famous but perhaps equally interesting, items that are stuck in storage. Rotating the famous items into storage doesn't mean the museum has blank walls for a year.
Arguably there's more educational value and more chance of a visitor serendipitously encountering something that speaks to them if the museum has a big set of prints rotated through, rather than a more static one. After all, even if you haven't ever seen an original of the Great Wave you almost certainly already know the image and it's likely already made most of the impact on you that it ever will...
qq66 · 2h ago
By limiting the hours today, it helps make sure that the people who do see it are the ones most interested in seeing it. Those are the ones who will look up the schedule, schedule their trip around it, etc... while if it's just permanently up, many of the viewers will be random passersby (and the number of viewers per hour of illumination will probably be lower)
qalmakka · 1h ago
Exactly this. When I was younger they did an exhibit of the Great Wave and Ukiyo-e next to where I lived, so I saved the date when the ticket office opened on my calendar. I then found friends interested in coming with me and grabbed some tickets before they ran out. If you just put it on display every day it will just fade away while being yet another print in a museum full of paintings. You're denying future generations the chance love this print and cherish the opportunity to see one in person. Art is not just taking a photo and passing by, it's about appreciating the fact some human made some very special thing we can now enjoy
MangoToupe · 17m ago
> You're denying future generations the chance love this print and cherish the opportunity to see one in person. Art is not just taking a photo and passing by, it's about appreciating the fact some human made some very special thing we can now enjoy
I personally don't get this attitude, but I also don't understand a lot of what draws people to museums when we have photographs of works of art. Which is not to say that I don't get why people view works i n person. I just don't understand neurotically trying to preserve a physical work when the author likely didn't even care that much or consider a more preservable medium to begin with.
vasco · 2h ago
Ok that is adding an interesting variable of perceived interest and then it's not about # of people anymore, but rather time plus # of _interested_ people. I guess that has to be the reasoning because it does make sense if that's the optimization goal.
Though I'd imagine mostly its going to be a random sample of people that happen to be there that day. I imagine there's likely under 1% of museum visitors actually chasing single works and planning trips like that. So most people that would see it are still just random "museum people" (which under the "interest" metric is still better than purely random people).
eru · 1h ago
> By limiting the hours today, it helps make sure that the people who do see it are the ones most interested in seeing it.
We should auction off the visitor spots, then.
msephton · 27m ago
You joke, but visitor slots are limited. I missed it at the British Museum because I turned up without a reservation. Also, BM have two impressions and rotates them meaning that people can see "it" (actually one or the other) for longer. Some institutions like Boston have a handful of impressions so can show "it" more frequently: the last time they cycled three.
politelemon · 1h ago
Same here, no answers. I'd also question why we should feel entitled to see it, or have that privilege at all. The curators might, at a certain point in time, hold a great appreciation for it versus me Joe public, and then it would make sense to simply not show it anymore as the trade-off isn't worth it.
pyrale · 2h ago
You mean, that hypothetical friend who wants to see this particular piece of art in situ so much but didn’t bother to plan their trip accordingly?
teekert · 2h ago
Scanners are also getting better. Perhaps this way it will make it all the way to the atomic cloning era. Just like we might all just make it until the “upload your consciousness” era, or the “we beat aging” era.
Muromec · 2h ago
No need for scanners in case of wood block prints -- we can always get more originals whenever we want.
plouffy · 2h ago
Unless you have access to the original woodblocks then not really. And even if you do, they’ve probably degraded quite a bit from the printing process so the result won’t be identical.
poulpy123 · 7m ago
I was wondering how it can be displayed in 2 museums simultaneously and it's because there is around 100 prints of it
sharkjacobs · 3h ago
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?
creakingstairs · 3h ago
I agree with you that replicas can be great.
Last year, I went to Otsuka museum of art[1] where they have life-size replicas of famous paintings (including the Sistine chapel), and it was great.
Before going, I was weirdly hung up about going to somewhere to see "replicas" instead of the real thing. But once I got there, I loved every second of it. All the artworks were replicated with careful detail in life size, so I felt like I wasn't missing much. In fact, I felt like I was enjoying it more! There were no crowds. I could get as close to the artworks as I wanted to. The lighting was great, since they didn't have to worry about damaging the paints. It was more engaging for the kids as they could free touch some of the replicated potteries etc.
It is a bit out of the way, but I'd highly recommend anyone going to Japan to check out that museum and maybe the onaruto bridge [2] on the way
Tangentially related, I remember that when the Sistine chapel was renovated in the 90s, people were shocked to see the vivid colors again. For decades, people had traveled far to see the original in person, when it was in fact but a shadow of itself.
msephton · 15m ago
It's the whole experience for me. It's a bit like asking why you would go to see a movie at the cinema when you can watch it on your smart phone—it's possible but when the opportunity to see it as its meant to be seen presents itself why wouldn't you? So it's the fact that it is "an original" (though there's no such thing with woodblocks)—in this case unique in many ways compared to any other imprint of The Great Wave. Plus the curation: when I saw one at Bristol they had other Hokusai works such as manga and his other waves and fuji that were kind of precursor to The Great Wave. ps: I made the site in the OP.
timr · 2h ago
> 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.
Muromec · 2h ago
Hokusai would want you to buy one of those 100 bucks re prints and get it on your wall to see.
riffraff · 1h ago
Countless people see replicas everyday, don't know they're replicas, and are happy about it.
Sometimes the replicas themselves are so old they become a monument on their own right, like some "Egyptian" obelisks in Rome, which are roman copies.
As you say, some works seem to lose something in any reproduction. La Giaconda (Mona Lisa) is a great example: any reproduction you may have seen in books or online hasn't captured the rainbow of background color in the original, or the sensation of viewing a living person sitting for a portrait when viewed at a few paces in the Louvre.
klausa · 1h ago
That's fascinating response! Mona Lisa is, to me, _the_ example of an artwork that is actually better viewed online instead of in person.
The painting is way smaller than you expect, it's always crowded with folks who want to take selfies, it's behind so many layers of glass/plastic that distort the colors — it's really, really hard to actually have any chance to appreciate it person.
guappa · 2h ago
The original one is behind an extremely thick layer of glass that completely distorts the colours.
isolli · 1h ago
It is now, but it used not to be...
nsxwolf · 3h ago
That's mostly it. You see it and say "Wow! That's the original!"
jojobas · 1h ago
You're not winning this, there are people arguing on which of the four original Black Square paintings is better.
sandspar · 2h ago
For me it's just more fun to see the original. My museum hobby is pointless, basically, so I feel free to set myself little rules. Perhaps it makes sense to think of going to museums as a type of collection hobby. Collectors typically seek authenticity, even if it's a bit silly. A rare Magic the Gathering card is merely cardboard, but ah - it's the special cardboard! Or take birding: I can see a pileated woodpecker on YouTube any time, but to see one in person, what bliss!
kragen · 2h ago
One of the most famous essays in the history of art criticism concerns precisely this question; this is probably the single intellectual work of the Frankfurt school for which it is remembered today, if we don't count inspiring right-wing conspiracy theories.
This is probably a good time to reread it, since AI art is forcing us to revisit many of the same questions from a new perspective.
ninetyninenine · 3h ago
Humans thrive on the illusion of that reality is better than the replica even when the replica is for all intents and purposes 100 percent identical.
In fact the replica can even be enhanced. Feed it into an LLM or diffuser and produce something better. But now we call this AI slop even when the slop is superior to most of what humans can ever produce in their lifetimes.
I think the key is not to pretend you’re above it. Don’t be that idiot in the corner asking stupid questions like “why do humans listen to music it’s just patterns of sound waves that have no intrinsic meaning and why do they sing songs and communicate in complicated ways when plain English works”
Are you human? Embrace your humanity and stop pretending you’re some genius savant who’s so above it all that he can’t comprehend human nature. You know why people want to see the real thing for the same reason why a bunch of people want to go to concerts and listen to music that is objectively worse than the recording. If you understand music then you understand art. Don’t pretend you don’t.
MangoToupe · 9m ago
> You know why people want to see the real thing for the same reason why a bunch of people want to go to concerts and listen to music that is objectively worse than the recording.
This seems like such a blatant apples and oranges comparison I'm not sure where to begin:
1. Live music is often better than studio recordings, 2. You can record memories with loved ones there that have no analogue in viewing a static piece of art, and 3. You're supporting a living artist.
People just want to view the mona lisa to because it's an easily purchasable experience widely seen to have value. Or something like that; to be honest, I don't quite grasp the psychology and visiting paris seems like it's not worth the effort.
sfn42 · 2h ago
I have some wool sweaters, home made by people I care about. I also have some store bought wool sweaters. By almost any measure, the store boughts are better. But I don't care about them.
If the store bought ones get destroyed or worn out I can just get a new one. The hand made ones are irreplaceable. They represent a huge personal time investment by someone who cares enough about me to do that work for me.
Art may be a little different but I reckon it's the same idea.
esperent · 2h ago
The Great Wave is a deservedly famous piece of art, but if it's the only thing of Hokusai that you know, do yourself a favor and look up some of his other work.
He also made some weird art involving an octopus and a woman, which is insightful both for understanding the other side of a famous artist, and also some of the weirder things in modern Japanese manga.
Edit: after I made this comment I was reminded of a comic I saw on reddit, where the artist was bemoaning their dream of getting paid to draw beautiful art, versus the reality where the only people willing to actually pay for art all want furry porn. So maybe not much has changed really, and maybe it says less about Japanese culture, and more about the general human condition.
bcraven · 1h ago
I suggest you look up the documentary _Hokusai: Old Man Crazy to Paint_ .[0]
It discusses how Hokusai changed his artistic style every ~10 years for his own pleasure.
The cover for Applications of Digital Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics
I'm (mis)remembering it was on a math textbook of some kind, perhaps a 90's era high school AP calculus BC text.
aosaigh · 3h ago
How do temporary exhibitions for famous artworks work? Do the museums pay the original owners to have it exhibited for a period of time? How does it get transported? It must be incredibly expensive to ship priceless artworks
bcraven · 1h ago
The full loans process is outlined on the British Museum YT:
I only recently learned about this piece after reading Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It's on the cover and it plays a somewhat important role in the story.
The Sumida Hokusai Museum is almost entirely a display of replicas. They are very upfront about being a “learning” museum - they do hold the original prints but display them in rotation. We were there last year and there was exactly one original print on display (in a back corner of the special exhibit room); it was one of the “36 views” but not one of the uber-famous ones.
As far as I'm aware this has never been on view. You can probably request to see it privately. (I'm the creator of the site in the OP)
lutusp · 1h ago
This alludes to a longstanding debate with no meaningful resolution.
I can see and appreciate Michelangelo's "David", in one of its two best-known Italian renderings (not counting the one in Las Vegas), even though the sculpture's human model, and the artist, are long dead.
I think Banksy has the right idea, even though people do what they can to undermine his works -- by, among other things, chain-sawing them out of the walls the artist chose to make his point, then offering them for sale.
A copy of a book isn't a travesty, so why should a copy of a painting be one?
bcraven · 1h ago
There's also a full-size plaster cast of David in 'The Castle Courts' at the V&A in London that's been there since 1857!
Thanks for the RSS feed. I added it to my reader (Flipboard) just in case I happen to be somewhere near an exhibition.
msephton · 2m ago
(site creator here) My pleasure! Summer is the most popular time of year, Japan or USA most likely but many around the world means it's quite a varied schedule. Tickets to the France exhibition (the print is on loan from Japan) sold out in a day.
> While these measures will not stop fading from occurring altogether, they will ensure that these world-famous prints fade so slowly that they will be seen by countless generations of visitors to the Museum in the future.
This trade-off is interesting, are we maximizing for number of people watching works? Or are we purely maximizing time? Because its not obvious to me that more people will see a work if it lasts 1000 more years but spends 80% of that time in storage, vs lasting 100 more years spending 0% of the time in storage.
Also lets say you go to the museum today and are lucky that it happens to be on display. But your friend travels to see it, it happens to be in 80% storage time, then the friend goes back home and dies without seeing it so that some future person that doesn't exist yet even can see it later without fading. Why is the future person more important than the current person, in a sense?
Storing it assumes a lot, that humanity will survive, that people will be interested in seeing it, that some fire isn't going to destroy their storage, etc. Meanwhile real life people would've seen it already. I don't have an answer, just questions though.
Arguably there's more educational value and more chance of a visitor serendipitously encountering something that speaks to them if the museum has a big set of prints rotated through, rather than a more static one. After all, even if you haven't ever seen an original of the Great Wave you almost certainly already know the image and it's likely already made most of the impact on you that it ever will...
I personally don't get this attitude, but I also don't understand a lot of what draws people to museums when we have photographs of works of art. Which is not to say that I don't get why people view works i n person. I just don't understand neurotically trying to preserve a physical work when the author likely didn't even care that much or consider a more preservable medium to begin with.
Though I'd imagine mostly its going to be a random sample of people that happen to be there that day. I imagine there's likely under 1% of museum visitors actually chasing single works and planning trips like that. So most people that would see it are still just random "museum people" (which under the "interest" metric is still better than purely random people).
We should auction off the visitor spots, then.
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?
Last year, I went to Otsuka museum of art[1] where they have life-size replicas of famous paintings (including the Sistine chapel), and it was great.
Before going, I was weirdly hung up about going to somewhere to see "replicas" instead of the real thing. But once I got there, I loved every second of it. All the artworks were replicated with careful detail in life size, so I felt like I wasn't missing much. In fact, I felt like I was enjoying it more! There were no crowds. I could get as close to the artworks as I wanted to. The lighting was great, since they didn't have to worry about damaging the paints. It was more engaging for the kids as they could free touch some of the replicated potteries etc.
It is a bit out of the way, but I'd highly recommend anyone going to Japan to check out that museum and maybe the onaruto bridge [2] on the way
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ctsuka_Museum_of_Art
[2] https://www.japan.travel/national-parks/parks/setonaikai/see...
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.
Sometimes the replicas themselves are so old they become a monument on their own right, like some "Egyptian" obelisks in Rome, which are roman copies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obelisks_in_Rome
The painting is way smaller than you expect, it's always crowded with folks who want to take selfies, it's behind so many layers of glass/plastic that distort the colors — it's really, really hard to actually have any chance to appreciate it person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/... (Zohn translation)
https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf (Zohn translation)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220128111229/http://raumgegenz... (French, blocked)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180730163618/https://www.artec... (German)
This is probably a good time to reread it, since AI art is forcing us to revisit many of the same questions from a new perspective.
In fact the replica can even be enhanced. Feed it into an LLM or diffuser and produce something better. But now we call this AI slop even when the slop is superior to most of what humans can ever produce in their lifetimes.
I think the key is not to pretend you’re above it. Don’t be that idiot in the corner asking stupid questions like “why do humans listen to music it’s just patterns of sound waves that have no intrinsic meaning and why do they sing songs and communicate in complicated ways when plain English works”
Are you human? Embrace your humanity and stop pretending you’re some genius savant who’s so above it all that he can’t comprehend human nature. You know why people want to see the real thing for the same reason why a bunch of people want to go to concerts and listen to music that is objectively worse than the recording. If you understand music then you understand art. Don’t pretend you don’t.
This seems like such a blatant apples and oranges comparison I'm not sure where to begin:
1. Live music is often better than studio recordings, 2. You can record memories with loved ones there that have no analogue in viewing a static piece of art, and 3. You're supporting a living artist.
People just want to view the mona lisa to because it's an easily purchasable experience widely seen to have value. Or something like that; to be honest, I don't quite grasp the psychology and visiting paris seems like it's not worth the effort.
If the store bought ones get destroyed or worn out I can just get a new one. The hand made ones are irreplaceable. They represent a huge personal time investment by someone who cares enough about me to do that work for me.
Art may be a little different but I reckon it's the same idea.
Waterfall penance is my favorite.
https://www.tremontauctions.com/auction-lot/hokusai-katsushi...
He also made some weird art involving an octopus and a woman, which is insightful both for understanding the other side of a famous artist, and also some of the weirder things in modern Japanese manga.
Edit: after I made this comment I was reminded of a comic I saw on reddit, where the artist was bemoaning their dream of getting paid to draw beautiful art, versus the reality where the only people willing to actually pay for art all want furry porn. So maybe not much has changed really, and maybe it says less about Japanese culture, and more about the general human condition.
It discusses how Hokusai changed his artistic style every ~10 years for his own pleasure.
[0] https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Hokusai:_Old_Man_Crazy_...
I'm (mis)remembering it was on a math textbook of some kind, perhaps a 90's era high school AP calculus BC text.
https://youtu.be/XuW2wSKOgtU
[Show HN:] Where can I see Hokusai's Great Wave today? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35985221 - May 2023 (114 comments)
https://hokusai-museum.jp/?lang=en
I can see and appreciate Michelangelo's "David", in one of its two best-known Italian renderings (not counting the one in Las Vegas), even though the sculpture's human model, and the artist, are long dead.
I think Banksy has the right idea, even though people do what they can to undermine his works -- by, among other things, chain-sawing them out of the walls the artist chose to make his point, then offering them for sale.
A copy of a book isn't a travesty, so why should a copy of a painting be one?
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-story-of-michelangelos-da...