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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   19499 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring.

I think this is culturally contingent.

I have personally cultivated an aesthetic appreciation for imitation and replicas, because I want to feel beauty in my life, and if you cultivate the joy of copies you can always cheaply and non-rivalrously enjoy art. What you lose in the ability to be a snob, you gain in the ability to be content with enough and what you have at hand.

Why not have a print of a beautiful piece of art that you love? Why not get a cheap but beautiful study of a famous piece done by an art student?

If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.

If you cultivate an appreciation that leads to the causal chain of a replica, then you can get almost the same "big" feelings from a copy of something. I went to the Nashville Parthenon, and I was blown away by it. It may be a copy, but with the right attitude it can be just as mind blowing and interesting as the real Parthenon, since it is causally downstream of the builders of the original Parthenon. It just happens to not share any of the matter of the original Parthenon, but who cares about a silly little detail like that?

Incredible worldview, thank you for sharing

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