Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
Copies and multiples
The distinction drawn by Nelson Goodman between what he calls “autographic”
and “allographic” works is relevant to the discussion of “originality”
and its supposed negation by photography, for it defines a contrast between
works which can and those which cannot be copied. Autographic works are
those of which even the most exact duplications do not count as genuine, while
“allographic” covers works, like musical symphonies, for which the distinction
between copy and original is meaningless: a musical performance is either of a
given work or it is not, just as any copy of a novel is as genuine an instance of
that novel as any other. The chief difference between the two groups, according
to Goodman, lies in the availability of notations for the identification of allographic
works. A musical score, for example, specifies which sequences of
sounds are performances of a work, just as a given sequence of letters determines
the identity of a literary work. But works like paintings, for which there is no
notation, typically can be identified only by the history of production and transmission
of the object in question. 8
The point to be stressed here is that autographic works can be either singular
or multiple by nature: “the example of printmaking refutes the unwary assumption
that in every autographic art a particular work exists only as a unique
object.” 9 One print of a lithograph or photograph is as original as any other
made from the same stone or negative, with “originality” defined by Goodman
in terms of the history of the work in time and space. In the case of a painting,
“The only way of ascertaining that the Lucretia before us is genuine is thus to
establish the historical fact that it is the actual object made by Rembrandt.” In
principle the situation is the same in the case of a multiple artform like etching:
“the only way of ascertaining whether a print is genuine is by finding out
whether it was taken from a certain plate.” 10
Goodman is careful not to tie his concept of “genuine” here to that of artistic
“originality,” taken for example as implying the work of the artist’s hand:
“Authenticity in an autographic art always depends upon the object’s having the
requisite, sometimes rather complicated, history of production, but that history
does not always include ultimate execution by the original artist.” 11 As Rosalind
Krauss has demonstrated, in an essay taking as motto Benjamin’s dictum on
photography’s challenge to the idea of “authenticity,” the history of production
on which the concept of “genuine” member of a set of multiples must rest can
be complicated indeed. How should we classify prints pulled (or printed) after
the artist’s death, or even just past the official size of an edition? What content
has the notion of “authenticity” in the case of an artist like Rodin, whose plaster
8 See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 113.
9 Ibid., p. 115.
10 Ibid., pp. 116, 119.
11 Ibid., p. 119, n. 12.
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