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Notes -
Well this gets into my other conversation on the topic.
If we care about the object for the good it provides other people, then surely the solution is to create an extremely convincing forgery and just... never disclose that the original was destroyed.
Much larger deceptions have been enacted throughout history for the purpose of maintaining the symbolic importance of a given relic or person.
And I don't think you would be able to convince the person with a dead sibling that she should refrain from violently enacting revenge on the killer even if it destroys a single cultural artifact... provided that it is the only real way to enact such vengeance.
I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable telling someone "no, your loss isn't great enough to justify destroying this cultural artifact just to hurt your sister's killer." Scale it up to something like, I dunno, The Sistine Chapel or the Statute of Liberty, where the true value is mostly bound up in the physical structure itself (and would be hard to recreate) and I start to agree.
At least part of this is due to the fact that a painting can be more easily 'replicated' than a building, especially one as meticulously studied as the Mona Lisa.
Has this ever successfully been done? I mean, I suppose we wouldn't know, but I sort of doubt it. Trying to convince people to value the common heritage of humanity seems a more practical option, and if one could develop and deploy a system to make such forgeries practical, it seems to me that the most likely outcome would be corrosive skepticism in such artifacts, not the preservation of their value. We value the mona lisa because it was touched by the hand of a master, and has passed down through time to us in a way that leaves us confident that it is real. If you can fake such things, how do you keep the capacity for such fakery from becoming common knowledge? Is this one of those plans where you lie even harder to everyone who notices you're lying? Don't those plans involve losing your hat?
For certain variants of 'successful.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoedler#Art_fraud_scandal_and_closure
https://www.insider.com/cases-of-faked-and-forged-artwork-2019-1
It seems entirely plausible that a single work, if faked convincingly enough, could probably be passed along for an indefinite amount of time without being noticed.
Interestingly, this starts to dovetail with the AI art debate. Do we care more about art that is actually the result of a human mind guiding human hands? Is that art more valuable?
I do think we can find more value in a work that has a traceable connection to our distant history, and that a version of the Mona Lisa that has, e.g. flecks of Leonardo Da Vinci's skin flakes in the ink from the painting process is more 'authentic' than a mostly-identical copy done by some other guy who is still alive.
On the other hand, I think that there are examples where fakery has even more drastic consequences, epistemic and otherwise, than merely replacing human artifacts that we are at least certain did exist at one point:
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
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