This is a cottage industry in some countries, often employing local artists to do the work as a form of practicing. I think it's OK so long as it is clearly stated and marked as a student copy. That is how art students learn -- by copying from the masters. As an artist and a painter from a past life I find the practice of charging money and making a business out of copies to be disgusting.
In 2019 I visited
Dafen village, outside of Shenzhen. I'm sure the company the OP mentioned commissions artists in Dafen or someplace similar. This is one of the centers of the painting reproduction industry in China. The people employed there were clearly quite skilled and were doing a mix of copies of famous works, pieces that weren't copies but were "to order" (such as generic landscapes and still lives, portraits done from photographs etc) and finally what I would call "original" works (i.e. attributed/signed to an individual artist, not directly imitating another work, potentially recognizable style). The second category (generic paintings to-order) were the most numerous, with both copies of famous originals and "actual" originals much fewer in number. Despite the giant-faceless-factory-full-of-drones stereotype of Chinese production, most of the painting workshops were very small, seemingly family or sole-proprietor run storefronts. There was clearly a lot of competition between them for both Chinese and international customers. Lots of specialization by style/genre and significant marketing efforts including some of the more successful workshops having large galleries and professional salespeople like you would find in any other cosmopolitan arts district. It already seemed like most of the painting workshops were actually moving away from selling outright copies, perhaps sensing that that business model was ultimately not the best way to attract an international clientele. Oh, and there were already a few "painting machines" at work there, so I'm sure the proportion of skilled artists employed there is declining, perhaps to be replaced eventually by a giant automated factory.
Here's a photo I took of a couple oil painters working in their shop in Dafen:
While the craftsmanship on display was impressive, the intent in reproducing these works was clearly to provide decorative copies, not forgeries. For example, many of the copies were clearly painted with acrylics, compared to oil originals. Oils are commonly seen as more prestigious and perhaps more authentic to the originals, but they take a lot longer to dry so unsuited to this kind of production environment. It's easy to visually tell the difference once you know how, but most of their customers I suspect don't know or don't care. It's difficult for me to get too upset at these businesses of making copies- they are clearly produced in bulk for decorative purposes, just a more skilled version of buying a inkjet print of Starry Night. Not fooling anyone and not trying to. Most of these I'm sure go to outfit hotels or other large interiors that need decoration in bulk.
pavt said:
Those are not professional artists. Doesn't matter of they get paid, that does not determine what professionalism is. A pro uses best materials and practices with a known provenance, ALL the time.
BTW, It's not the artists who want to get paid forever. Most of them don't care, as long as the get attribution for the work they do. -- its the publishers and the lawyers that want to get paid forever.
...
Not to pick on you again pavt, but in my experience these two statements are not really accurate. There is no stable idea of "professionalization" in art. The only somewhat stable but still poor surrogate we have for it is consistent gallery representation and/or commercial success. That kind of success can have very little to do with using "best materials and practices with a known provenance". I've known ultra successful artists who make work with literal garbage. I've seen work made decades ago with now-decaying cardboard, foam or cheap melamine sell for millions. I've also seen artists who have built incredibly impressive careers and are fully canonized within the art history books who have made works that are intentionally and specifically fabricated with materials that have no art historical precedent or provenance, materials that are probably more familiar to PM members than they are to most other artists.
Finally, the idea of artists not wanting to get paid later on for their work isn't really true either. The increasing financialization of the art world within the last 20-30 years has lead to many scenarios where the original artist remains financially destitute while their work sells for incredible amounts on the "secondary market" (i.e. dealers/collectors selling to dealers/collectors, rather than the artist selling direct). This has resulted in a lot of discussion around
resale royalties, including creation of new laws in some places. Keep in mind that the number of art school graduates has increased at the same time as the art market has exploded (along with cost of living increases in art world centers), so there is a significant constituency behind these laws who see resale royalties as a type of basic labor protection. One of the latest attempts to give artists a cut of secondary market sales is the currently-trendy
NFT. While in my opinion there are significant issues with NFTs, it shows that this problem of dealers making incredible sums while the original artists don't is certainly on many artist's minds.
FWIW my credentials here are I have been involved in the contemporary art world for 10+ years in both professional, amateur and social capacities and so has my partner. Many of my friends are artists at all different levels and degrees of success in the "art world" system and we've worked in and dealt with museums, small and large galleries, biennials, various nonprofits etc. Worked in other peoples organizations and run my own (small) ones a couple times. The odd thing about the so-called art world though is that it is so fractal and full of isolated pockets and scenes that someone like pavt probably has a completely different view of it than I do, and same with my view compared to some of my friends.
Oh also, while I love artists I also definitely agree with GregSY that "the world's most sensitive and caring and good people - artists - just happen to be the most catty, back-stabbing, and otherwise superficial people as well"
. Definitely many bad actors as well. However, it's not so simple as artists becoming better business people and cutting out the middlemen. It's very tricky to understand where exactly demand comes from in the art world- there are certainly massive, massive asset bubbles propping up large sectors of the art market (like in many other markets at the moment). There is also widespread and related practice of art used as a financial instrument by the ultra-wealthy. But also there is a set of interlocking academic, social and nonprofit systems that are maintained by these middlemen, which artists in turn rely on for support and promotion. One thing a lot of people overlook is that it takes a specific kind of work to present an artists work to a larger audience (a prerequisite to selling), and many artists don't have the skills or aren't interested. Its incredibly complex and definitely shady, but I think most systems aimed at disruption of the existing market (such as NFTs) preserve some place for these middlemen to maintain the fabric of the art world that artists (and otherwise-unrelated art appreciators) rely on. Whether this is a good or bad thing for art or artists in the long term, I can't really say.
