Oh yeah, musical covers are a very good example. I thought of Metallica's famous cover albums that both helped Metallica artists to overcome burnout from sudden fame and boosted popularity of the songs they took, especially since they took extra steps to seek out lesser known artists, not just take something from a different genre, reimagine it as hard rock/heavy metal and capitalise on the popularity of the original
I legit did not know that Van Halen had covered "You Really Got Me" until today, and I am pleased to say that it is now my 3rd favourite version (after The Kinks and 801).
Nevertheless, I take your point and I am firmly subscribed to the Platonic interpretation of music covers. But I do think that the apparent tendency of covers to be improvements is largely a selection effect; getting close to the Platonic realm is hard, getting closer even harder.
I dunno. I came of age late 70's / early 80's - The Kinks were before my time, but we listened to them anyway. I think I just didn't listen to much Van Halen.
It occurs to me that for a long time, the only version of "Wild Thing" I knew was by Hendrix. News to me that it was by The Troggs, but my impression is that most people prefer the original? If so, runs against the grain of the Platonic theory.
No, of course not. But what I meant was that the Hendrix version apparently has "relic value". In the same way that a hat once worn by Jimi Hendrix has more relic value than one once worn by Reg Presley, a song sung by Hendrix apparently has more cachet than the same song sung by Presley - even when Presley did it better (arguably.)
I think, you are missing the point of the complaint of “people on Substack”. It’s not about aesthetic vs relic value it’s about presence of humans in the first place. Ai art fundamentally has inckiness factor that is hard to ignore when one is aware, that the work is created by machine, route, empty process, that feels inherently inhumane. Presence of people injects something separate from relic value - “people are art”, in my understanding after gathering and reading many grievances about ai art.
It’s a very fancy auto completion mechanism that is build on a blended soup of data, that is mostly stolen from normal, unassuming people.
Hayao Miyazaki described it as “insult to humanity itself”
When you revere the skill of “specialists” about their forgery be it cars, watches, Chinese or Dutch. There is story to tell about a human component that is irreplaceable, and separate from aesthetic value or relic value. As put by Freya Holmer (YouTube: @acegikmo): the absence of human story removes any value from art, it becomes meaningless.
The masters that you admire on merit of aesthetic value are “there” to begin with, they exist. There is no master behind AI models.
There is mastery in engineering feats that go toward creating those models. The math, the programming, the problem solving all of that is backed by the brains of masters. Then it all goes away when what you are left with are giant tables of numbers, mere art is reduced to statistics, mere humane understanding is reduced to statistics, mere human experience is reduced to statistics, mere human life is reduced to statistics.
Hopefully this comment will expand the discussion and will add a different perspective. I’m writing this in no hostile way or anger, but I just found a missing component of a well written argument.
If I’m missing anything myself or made error, apologies in advance.
Not to distract from the discussion of relic value, but I think you are describing a couple of different categories of things.
The example of the copy is a replication.
The example of the cover song is an adaptation.
The example of the fake Vermeer is an extension.
I was trying to maintain the parallelism in that third example, but at the cost of clarity, I fear. The Vermeer forger wasn't copying Vermeers, he was making paintings in the style of Vermeer which he then attributed to Vermeer.
Anyhow, the point is only that you need to be careful about treating those three categories as the same kind of thing. When Elvis recorded "Hound Dog" he wasn't trying to sound just like Big Mama Thornton. He was adapting her song to his own particular idiom. But there was a time when you could still find records of anonymous studio bands trying to exactly mimic the hits of the day, hoping you weren't a discerning enough listener (or maybe merely hoping your budgetary values trumped your aesthetic ones). That's replication, not adaptation. And while I couldn't tell you who got there first, consider all the bands who piled on to the surf guitar sound once it hit the big time. (Or grunge, for you slightly younger folks. You kids too young for that to resonate will have to insert your own example.)
[My wife would like it to be known that she pointed out the distinction between replication and adaptation first, and I have replicated and adapted and extended her idea here.]
I agree that they are not all exactly the same thing. Also, I’m not giving a complete metaphysics for all of these kinds of things. Music in particular is a tricky case. Is a piece of music the score? The first performance? An iconic performance? A vaguely bounded abstract object that can be multiply instantiated? Copies aren’t exactly replications. If an art student is sitting in a museum sketching a Rubens painting, she’s not aiming for a 1:1 replication, but trying to get the lines of it, the feel of the composition, that kind of thing. And cover songs: people who go to tribute band shows (e.g. Brit Floyd) want them to sound *exactly* like the studio versions of Pink Floyd. But if you go see Matteo Mancuso (as I recently did) perform Jaco Pastorius’s “The Chicken”, you want to hear Mancuso’s innovative take, his improvisations, and (in this case) how he can play it double time. That’s an adaptation in a way that Brit Floyd is not.
Anyway, I think that art is like the tree of life, except that all the species can breed with each other and we wind up with wild new forms of being.
The reason that I doubt it is because AI cannot make anything distinctive from any other digital copy of the same thing. It’s like saying that one digital copy of MS Word has relic value and other qualitatively identical copies do not.
Wouldn’t forging art fail on ethical basis as stealing? It may be a perfect copy and we may not care about the relic aspect but is an moral discomfort somewhere. If the original artist gets to approve the copy and/or gets royalties from it, then great we can revert back to aesthetics vs relic debate. But apart from the music covers which is a domain where IP works, in the rest of the examples, the content is produced without creator’s consent.
The legal/moral aspect is a different kettle of fish from the purely aesthetic issues, which is what I was thinking about. Even there, though, I think moral intuitions—and market incentives—are all over the place. For example, take the replica car market. Porsche gets zero dollars on replica 550 Spyders, but they don’t fight their manufacture (I assume because they are effectively advertising for the Porsche brand).
The purported £2.5 million gaffe by London's National Gallery regarding Rubens's (or whoever's it is) Samson & Delilah is compounded by the lengths to which the gallery is allegedly going to fabricate evidence of the fact that the painting is not fabricated, whereas Rubens experts contend it's an obvious fake. Most Rubenses were not painted by Rubens, who operated a conveyor belt school in Antwerp churning paintings out by the lorryload in order to satisfy his wealthy clientele. He would daub a few brushstrokes to qualify the works for his signature, but more was often not in, not at that rate of production.
I wonder if the "reinterpretations" of songs are really fakes. Otherwise, every time a play gets put on, you could say it's an attempt at a fake. Except in the case of Samuel Beckett: there, if you don't fake it exactly, his estate will sue you. An interesting switch of arguments.
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I think the whole space of fakes, covers, and interpretations is really interesting and complex. Why do people care so much about the percentage of Rubens's brushstrokes on a painting vs. just the beauty of the painting? But we do. Yet we don't think a modern reconception of King Lear set in WWI is a fraud. There doesn't seem to be any kind of principled system here.
“Is my role today to bring you Japanese culture via wasabi flown to Paris?” Saadé asked. “No, my role is to explain to you that it’s grated this way and put on fish for this reason, and I can do that with wasabi from France.”
I couldn’t help but think that it’s actually far more interesting to do it his way – to interpret a cuisine rather than attempt to transpose it.
Why do people care so much about the brushstrokes, or the painter, or the Rolex watch, vs. the beauty of the object? Because humans are herd animals, and need the approval, and maybe the jealousy, of the rest of the herd. Step outside of that, and you see a raised eyebrow, or a turned shoulder. Many or most people cannot bear that. I am not part of the art world, but I have been obsessed with beauty, in whatever form, since I was a tot. Now I am pushing 75, and that has not changed. I see the beauty in the paintings and statues in the Metropolitan, and in the voices at the opera, and even sometimes in a perfect double play in baseball. To me, the beauty is in and of itself, independent of the creator or any type of monetary value. I can't afford the pre-Raphaelite painting at the Met, but I have a copy that is a dead ringer, and I love it. Even though she was considered spoiled and difficult, I adore my recordings of Kathleen Battle, and always will. I have a very fake, but excellently wrought Canova statue. These, at least to me, are beautiful, independent of anything else. I also notice (though I could be wrong) that all the commenters appear to be male. I am female, and wonder if that makes a difference....
I completely agree with you about beauty, and also agree that monetary value is, at best, only contingently related. But I think relic value is another aesthetic dimension, and I do feel the pull of it— I would rather have a treasured book signed by the author than just the book alone. That’s true even if it is an obscure author and I would get no herd approval for it.
I’m wondering if this Chinese attitude toward fakes partly explains their approach to intellectual property?
Oh yeah, musical covers are a very good example. I thought of Metallica's famous cover albums that both helped Metallica artists to overcome burnout from sudden fame and boosted popularity of the songs they took, especially since they took extra steps to seek out lesser known artists, not just take something from a different genre, reimagine it as hard rock/heavy metal and capitalise on the popularity of the original
I legit did not know that Van Halen had covered "You Really Got Me" until today, and I am pleased to say that it is now my 3rd favourite version (after The Kinks and 801).
Nevertheless, I take your point and I am firmly subscribed to the Platonic interpretation of music covers. But I do think that the apparent tendency of covers to be improvements is largely a selection effect; getting close to the Platonic realm is hard, getting closer even harder.
It might be generational. The Van Halen version was later than both The Kinks and 801 and definitely the most famous version when I was young.
I dunno. I came of age late 70's / early 80's - The Kinks were before my time, but we listened to them anyway. I think I just didn't listen to much Van Halen.
It occurs to me that for a long time, the only version of "Wild Thing" I knew was by Hendrix. News to me that it was by The Troggs, but my impression is that most people prefer the original? If so, runs against the grain of the Platonic theory.
Well, not all covers are improvements on the original.
No, of course not. But what I meant was that the Hendrix version apparently has "relic value". In the same way that a hat once worn by Jimi Hendrix has more relic value than one once worn by Reg Presley, a song sung by Hendrix apparently has more cachet than the same song sung by Presley - even when Presley did it better (arguably.)
I think, you are missing the point of the complaint of “people on Substack”. It’s not about aesthetic vs relic value it’s about presence of humans in the first place. Ai art fundamentally has inckiness factor that is hard to ignore when one is aware, that the work is created by machine, route, empty process, that feels inherently inhumane. Presence of people injects something separate from relic value - “people are art”, in my understanding after gathering and reading many grievances about ai art.
It’s a very fancy auto completion mechanism that is build on a blended soup of data, that is mostly stolen from normal, unassuming people.
Hayao Miyazaki described it as “insult to humanity itself”
When you revere the skill of “specialists” about their forgery be it cars, watches, Chinese or Dutch. There is story to tell about a human component that is irreplaceable, and separate from aesthetic value or relic value. As put by Freya Holmer (YouTube: @acegikmo): the absence of human story removes any value from art, it becomes meaningless.
The masters that you admire on merit of aesthetic value are “there” to begin with, they exist. There is no master behind AI models.
There is mastery in engineering feats that go toward creating those models. The math, the programming, the problem solving all of that is backed by the brains of masters. Then it all goes away when what you are left with are giant tables of numbers, mere art is reduced to statistics, mere humane understanding is reduced to statistics, mere human experience is reduced to statistics, mere human life is reduced to statistics.
Hopefully this comment will expand the discussion and will add a different perspective. I’m writing this in no hostile way or anger, but I just found a missing component of a well written argument.
If I’m missing anything myself or made error, apologies in advance.
Peace and love,
NG
Not to distract from the discussion of relic value, but I think you are describing a couple of different categories of things.
The example of the copy is a replication.
The example of the cover song is an adaptation.
The example of the fake Vermeer is an extension.
I was trying to maintain the parallelism in that third example, but at the cost of clarity, I fear. The Vermeer forger wasn't copying Vermeers, he was making paintings in the style of Vermeer which he then attributed to Vermeer.
Anyhow, the point is only that you need to be careful about treating those three categories as the same kind of thing. When Elvis recorded "Hound Dog" he wasn't trying to sound just like Big Mama Thornton. He was adapting her song to his own particular idiom. But there was a time when you could still find records of anonymous studio bands trying to exactly mimic the hits of the day, hoping you weren't a discerning enough listener (or maybe merely hoping your budgetary values trumped your aesthetic ones). That's replication, not adaptation. And while I couldn't tell you who got there first, consider all the bands who piled on to the surf guitar sound once it hit the big time. (Or grunge, for you slightly younger folks. You kids too young for that to resonate will have to insert your own example.)
[My wife would like it to be known that she pointed out the distinction between replication and adaptation first, and I have replicated and adapted and extended her idea here.]
I agree that they are not all exactly the same thing. Also, I’m not giving a complete metaphysics for all of these kinds of things. Music in particular is a tricky case. Is a piece of music the score? The first performance? An iconic performance? A vaguely bounded abstract object that can be multiply instantiated? Copies aren’t exactly replications. If an art student is sitting in a museum sketching a Rubens painting, she’s not aiming for a 1:1 replication, but trying to get the lines of it, the feel of the composition, that kind of thing. And cover songs: people who go to tribute band shows (e.g. Brit Floyd) want them to sound *exactly* like the studio versions of Pink Floyd. But if you go see Matteo Mancuso (as I recently did) perform Jaco Pastorius’s “The Chicken”, you want to hear Mancuso’s innovative take, his improvisations, and (in this case) how he can play it double time. That’s an adaptation in a way that Brit Floyd is not.
Anyway, I think that art is like the tree of life, except that all the species can breed with each other and we wind up with wild new forms of being.
Could thoughtful use of AI to produce art result in art with relic value?
The reason that I doubt it is because AI cannot make anything distinctive from any other digital copy of the same thing. It’s like saying that one digital copy of MS Word has relic value and other qualitatively identical copies do not.
How would you react if a work with great relic value was later revealed to be at least partially made with AI?
I don’t see how it is conceptually possible for AI to create something with relic value, but I am open to counterexamples.
Idk, maybe a famous webcomic author admitting to training an AI on their work and generating future comics that way.
Or a famous painter painting scenes they generated with AI.
You may have works of art you admire that have been secretly AI generated for all you know!
Wouldn’t forging art fail on ethical basis as stealing? It may be a perfect copy and we may not care about the relic aspect but is an moral discomfort somewhere. If the original artist gets to approve the copy and/or gets royalties from it, then great we can revert back to aesthetics vs relic debate. But apart from the music covers which is a domain where IP works, in the rest of the examples, the content is produced without creator’s consent.
The legal/moral aspect is a different kettle of fish from the purely aesthetic issues, which is what I was thinking about. Even there, though, I think moral intuitions—and market incentives—are all over the place. For example, take the replica car market. Porsche gets zero dollars on replica 550 Spyders, but they don’t fight their manufacture (I assume because they are effectively advertising for the Porsche brand).
The purported £2.5 million gaffe by London's National Gallery regarding Rubens's (or whoever's it is) Samson & Delilah is compounded by the lengths to which the gallery is allegedly going to fabricate evidence of the fact that the painting is not fabricated, whereas Rubens experts contend it's an obvious fake. Most Rubenses were not painted by Rubens, who operated a conveyor belt school in Antwerp churning paintings out by the lorryload in order to satisfy his wealthy clientele. He would daub a few brushstrokes to qualify the works for his signature, but more was often not in, not at that rate of production.
I wonder if the "reinterpretations" of songs are really fakes. Otherwise, every time a play gets put on, you could say it's an attempt at a fake. Except in the case of Samuel Beckett: there, if you don't fake it exactly, his estate will sue you. An interesting switch of arguments.
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I think the whole space of fakes, covers, and interpretations is really interesting and complex. Why do people care so much about the percentage of Rubens's brushstrokes on a painting vs. just the beauty of the painting? But we do. Yet we don't think a modern reconception of King Lear set in WWI is a fraud. There doesn't seem to be any kind of principled system here.
Funny how echoes crop up in the strangest of places. Here's a quote from an article by Alexander Hurst in today's Guardian (it's about whether Europe should import US food - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/20/american-food-europe-trade-deal-eu-donald-trump):
“Is my role today to bring you Japanese culture via wasabi flown to Paris?” Saadé asked. “No, my role is to explain to you that it’s grated this way and put on fish for this reason, and I can do that with wasabi from France.”
I couldn’t help but think that it’s actually far more interesting to do it his way – to interpret a cuisine rather than attempt to transpose it.
Why do people care so much about the brushstrokes, or the painter, or the Rolex watch, vs. the beauty of the object? Because humans are herd animals, and need the approval, and maybe the jealousy, of the rest of the herd. Step outside of that, and you see a raised eyebrow, or a turned shoulder. Many or most people cannot bear that. I am not part of the art world, but I have been obsessed with beauty, in whatever form, since I was a tot. Now I am pushing 75, and that has not changed. I see the beauty in the paintings and statues in the Metropolitan, and in the voices at the opera, and even sometimes in a perfect double play in baseball. To me, the beauty is in and of itself, independent of the creator or any type of monetary value. I can't afford the pre-Raphaelite painting at the Met, but I have a copy that is a dead ringer, and I love it. Even though she was considered spoiled and difficult, I adore my recordings of Kathleen Battle, and always will. I have a very fake, but excellently wrought Canova statue. These, at least to me, are beautiful, independent of anything else. I also notice (though I could be wrong) that all the commenters appear to be male. I am female, and wonder if that makes a difference....
I completely agree with you about beauty, and also agree that monetary value is, at best, only contingently related. But I think relic value is another aesthetic dimension, and I do feel the pull of it— I would rather have a treasured book signed by the author than just the book alone. That’s true even if it is an obscure author and I would get no herd approval for it.
Thinking empathically, I get that. I guess I wasn't in empathy mode when I wrote the above. My bad.