“In the 1960s, there was a movement to fight what was a really brand new high-end market by making challenging art in larger editions,” Gopnik said, “making it available to anyone who wanted it, instead of it being just something for the high end.”
The following is an edited transcript of Gopnik’s conversation about multiples with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio.
David Brancaccio: These multiples helped shape you and the whole Gopnik family? You have a stake in the story?
Blake Gopnik: Yeah, I’m afraid so. When I was a kid, I grew up surrounded by art, by mostly pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein or Claes Oldenburg. And I guess I didn’t really realize until recently, that all of these works that my poor, young, academic assistant professor parents bought, were produced by this company in New York called Multiples, Inc. And they were the target market for it. The idea was to make all of this brand new art accessible, and my parents bought it, hook, line and sinker. And I don’t think I’d be an art critic today if I hadn’t grown up surrounded by that art.
“The point of multiples was never to provide easy art for every living room. This was about presenting challenging art for anyone who wanted it.”
Blake Gopnik, art critic
Brancaccio: And some of the multiples that your folks got was challenging art?
Gopnik: Yeah, I think it’s important to realize that the point of multiples was never to provide easy art for every living room. This was about presenting challenging art for anyone who wanted it. Because of course, before that, high-end art always went for a fortune, or at least for the decade before multiples came along.
Brancaccio: I mean, it makes things more accessible. But I guess economics often says that if one is precious, 300 of the same thing would be less valuable. I know printmakers don’t see it that way, they tend to do editions.
Gopnik: It’s certainly true that something that comes out as a multiple is less valuable on the market. But part of the point of multiples was to push back against the market. And their being cheaper, and their being not unique, was part of the point. They were supposed to be about mass production. They use the materials of mass production, like plastic. They used actual fabricators, you know, from the world of everyday commodities, like banner-makers, to make these objects. So it was really a pushback against the whole notion of uniqueness that the high-end market had always been built on.
Brancaccio: The modern world, though, is — it’s hard to even think of multiples. I mean, look what musical artists do. They make multiples for a living. They don’t want just to make just one record. And with things being downloadable, it’s just a whole new world.
“Part of the point of multiples was to push back against the market. And their being cheaper, and their being not unique, was part of the point.”
Gopnik
Gopnik: Yeah, it’s funny, you know. I wrote about a couple of very current artists who work in multiples. And what they do is they kind of make multiples by hand, they push back against the digital, they push back even against the machine made. So this artist called Danh Vo, a Danish artist, he got his father to hand-copy out a letter from the 19th century about 2,000 times. His multiple is actually a handmade multiple, which is a kind of contradiction in terms, but that’s what they’re interested in. The best artists today are playing with the very idea of the edition. They’re not buying into it. They’re not making it easier. They’re actually making it harder.
Brancaccio: He made his father do all that work?
Gopnik: He didn’t just make his father do it, he paid his father. Not a huge amount of money. His father got something like $125 per letter. But his father was a very humble man who, you know, owned food stalls and little restaurants in Denmark, so he was happy to make a nice little supplement to his retirement income by copying out this letter by hand.
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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
