Duplicate this!

I'm interested in thinking about the crisis of realism (or maybe replication) that technological advances like the photograph and the chromolithograph interjected into late 19th century American culture. Levine elaborates on what should come as no surprise: the ability to "perfectly" reproduce sacred art made those invested in protecting and valuing that art nervous. Something we cannot forget, however, in the prominence of literary (and artistic and even theatrical) realism at this same moment. Think about Levine's cast of characters: Henry James, Henry Adams, William Dean Howells. They are all quintessentially realist authors. Even Walt Whitman, the voice of middle-brow democracy in Levine's history, has been lumped into the realist camp, despite his generic incongruity. Realism was the lingua franca of this time period, which makes the ability to replicate art mechanically even more dangerous, and, to my mind, interesting. Realism has always been pitted against modernism, but can we also pit it against technological modernization?

Another intriguing aspect of this historical reality resides in its coda. In his epilogue Levine tells us how in the 70s and 80s the Met Museum of Art "began to restore and exhibit [its extensive collection of plaster casts of sculptures] along with Princeton and Carnegie Mellon Universities and the New York Academy of Art" (Levine 274). More than just the narcissism of seeing CMU in print, Levine exposes an interesting irony: since "the casts were made before the effects of pollution took the toll on the originals, they contain more detail than the genuine works of art" (274). While we could easily explain this as a Po-Mo triumph of the simulacrum over the Real, I think this brings up a material paradox. The mechanical art of casting priceless sculptures has, in truth, guaranteed the longevity of the objects d'art. Without this material reproduction even collectors would have lost incalculable amounts of detail and richness of these important pieces. We can intuit why 19th century--and even 20th and 21st century--critics are skeptical about the artistic status of replication, but what about restoration? Creativity, the production of unique, never before seen objects and ideas will always be important to culture, but how do we trace the changing merit of archiving that which have decided to preserve? There seems to be an uneasy tension between production of the new and the protection of the old even then. Could restoration based on the author's "true wishes" violate some sort of readerly and scholarly pact?