I agree that there is something about "originals" that fufills a romantic longing for the "long ago and far away". But since a copy is always different from the original, and always less even when it aims at more, people will prefer the original both for its faults and for its perfections. It's a matter of wanting "the real" and is thus tightly attached to our individual desire for individual experience. We want to make up our own minds regarding the truth of our experiences.
All humans probably retain a degree of shamanistic reverence for fetish articles. It begins in infancy as any mother who has misplaced her child's fetish blanket or toy well knows. In adulthood we continue our vague longings for some magical item, by now generalized as a historical artifact. Whether it's a bone fragment of Saint NutCase or an old sock worn by George Washington matters little as regards the "magic" of vicariously reconnecting to some infantile substitute for mother's breast. Some nutcases, like almost all artists, keep on making their own fetish objects -- artworks-- to reconnect again and again. Whatever civilization is or could be, if it's going to be human it will also be expressive of the need to reconnect with sources, both public and personal. Freud explained it long ago in his Civilization and Its Discontents. WC > > The demand for an original sculpture is just as irrational > as that for the > thigh bone of Saint Eustace -- it's Tjurunga -- and it > appears that human > communities at all levels of development have cherished > some kind of object > just because it is ancient -- maybe it's a rock or a > bone or some kind of > artifact that connects us to the time of the ancestors.
