Fabrication

I once read a book about teaching yourself to draw, and it set out that there were three kinds of drawing an artist should practise. First of all copying from life, second of all copying from other artists, and third works of pure imagination. While all of these are no doubt invaluable in teaching yourself how to draw, I don’t think that they are all necessarily of equal wider interest. While an artist might teach themselves vital skills by copying the work of other masters, they need to move beyond being a mere copyist.

However we now seem to live in an era of copyists.

The advent of 3D printing, contributes to this notion of mere fabrication. That you can draft up, or copy the appropriate specifications, pop them into a 3D printer and hey presto out pops something, something that is not un-adjacent to something real and useful. But this is not something that has been crafted, honed, it is merely something that has popped out of a machine.

To what extent is a film like The Watchmen a genuine work of art, or is it merely a workmanlike rendering of the original comic strip. Or the recent Ghost in the Shell, was there really a need to plunder the original films to make an inferior live action version stripped of their strangeness, Japanese-ness or opaque seriousness.

There is a world of difference between making something with genuine feeling, something that you fervently believe needs to exist, and needs to be made to the very best of your abilities, and the mere technical fabrication of something to a specification.

We ought to value and cherish the original as it is becoming all too rare.