[BELOW IS A PARTIAL REPRINT OF A 7-21-2004 WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE BY ANNE MARIE CHAKER ON THE SUBJECT OF THE REPRODUCTION OF ART. SPECIFICALLY, THIS NEWSPAPER ARTICLE IS ABOUT ART REPRODUCTIONS USING THE LATEST HIGH-TECH INKJET PRINTING PROCESS CALLED 'GICLÉE.' GICLÉE IS CURRENTLY BEING USED TO COPY FINE ART. AND THESE COPYS OR EMBELLISHED COPYS ARE THEN BEING SOLD AS ART OR FINE ART PRINTS.]
"When Art Imitates Art: The 'Giclée' Debate"
by Anne Marie Chaker, 2004
Clair Figliolia-Searl is a longtime art collector whose Florida home is filled with everything from oil paintings to bronze statues. But last year, her collection grew by about a third after she discovered an artist named Pino who makes very realistic digital reproductions of his own oil paintings, which have sold for as much as $120,000. "They just looked so realistic to me, and I couldn't afford an original," says the 53-year-old Ms. Figliolia-Searl, whose home now boasts about a half-dozen works by Pino, costing her as little as $3,100 for one of them.
A growing number of artists are dabbling in a new kind of reproduction that's being widely sold in thousands of galleries across the country. These high-end replicas, made using a method of digital printing called "giclée," are replicas of originals that can sell for thousands of dollars a pop. In limited editions, some artists sell hundreds of these at a fraction of the price.
The ease with which artists can replicate their own works themselves --- their initial investment may be as little as several thousand dollars for an inkjet printer and other tools --- has made the technique ubiquitous in the art world.
Derived from the French word for "spray," giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") quickly has become one of the art world's most contentious topics. Advocates say the technological development democratizes the marketplace for fine art, allowing consumers who cannot afford the real thing to buy something that seems awfully close. But naysayers think the pieces are nothing more than glorified posters. And while the works have caught the fancy of art lovers on a budget, it's still unclear how the pieces will stack up as long-term investments.
"That is the sort of thing we don't sell here," says Mary Sechrist Bartow, senior vice president of the print department at Sotheby's Holdings Inc. in New York. "I call it just a fancy kind of reproduction." (Sotheby's has sold original digital prints, but Ms. Bartow draws a distinction between digital printing to create original works and as a reproductive tool.)
Giclée artists say their creations deserve recognition as genuine art. The reproductions are typically done in limited quantities, often signed by hand and numbered. Sometimes, the artist will hand-embellish elements of the work with his or her own paintbrush, to give it texture and make it look more like an original.
Many in the art world argue that once an artist puts his or her name on a piece, then nobody should question its validity. "It's art," says Victor Wiener, an independent appraiser in New York and former executive director of the Appraisers Association of America.
Digital Prints Divide Art Experts
Fine art or faux art, few would debate that the market for giclée has exploded during the past few years. Harvest Productions Ltd., an Anaheim Hills, Calif., printing facility, says it has seen growth of 20% a year over the past six years in digital reproductions. "It's like this meteoric rise," says Richard Solomon, president of Pace Editions Inc., a fine art publisher in New York. Hewlett-Packard Co., which entered the fine-art printing market in 2001 with an inkjet printer, projects that the market for digital fine-art will double by 2007 to $600 million from $290 million in 2003.
Still, many art experts remain on the fence about giclée. "I will never put a reproduction into a museum collection," says Marilyn Kushner, chair of the department of prints, drawings and photographs at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. However, she says, "If a digital print is original, or manipulated in such a way that it becomes a new work of art, then I will consider it."
Artists who swear by giclée say it's helped them expand both their exposure and their bank balances. Pino, an Italian-born artist living in New Jersey who's as well known for his innocent oil paintings of women and children as for his steamy Danielle Steel bookcover illustrations, started dabbling in giclée reproductions in 2001. This year, he will produce more than 3,000 prints. Simple prints start for as little as $1,950, while his hand-embellished ones hit the market for $3,500 to $4,200. (His oil paintings sell for an average of $40,000.) Today, giclées account for 70% of Pino's total revenues, says his son and publisher Max Dangelico. "You can't paint that many originals," he says.
Though the secondary market for giclées is still in its infancy, enthusiasts say there are already examples of works increasing in value. An embellished giclée of Pino's "Joyful Memories" hit the market at $3,200 in 2003 but sold last month at the E.S. Lawrence Gallery in Aspen, Colo., for $6,800. Los Angeles artist Mark Ryden sold giclée prints of his work, "The Debutante," for $900 in 1999, and one of them fetched $3,200 this year at the Mendenhall Gallery in Pasadena, Calif.
Some art-world insiders say that prices are being buoyed by short-term frenzy and that the work might not be worth much over the long haul. "In the end, a reproduction is a reproduction," says Jon Cone, president of Cone Editions Press Ltd., a digital printmaking studio based in East Topsham, Vt.
Artists have long used printmaking techniques to create multiples of a single work, from ancient Chinese woodcuts to Andy Warhol's bold silkscreen prints. With other forms of printmaking, such as lithography or screenprinting, the artist actively draws or cuts on a plate, stone or even paper, which is eventually used to make an imprint. Those processes can be time-consuming and expensive for the artist.
Many in the art world view giclée as a natural successor to such earlier forms of printmaking --- this time with the use of a computer and specialized printer that can capture shades and subtleties that earlier forms of reproductive printmaking might miss.
Still, some artists who have embraced giclée are doing some soul searching. Mr. Ryden is now trying to cut back on his prodigious giclée output, which during the past reached as much as 200 prints per edition. While those sizable editions were "financially rewarding," he now thinks that there was "something tacky about it."
[Note: Expect pirated inkjet fine art prints. Counterfeits of counterfeits or reproductions of reproductions are already here. Anything easy to make and easy to sell is just too tempting.]
(Note: We do not know if there is some procedure we are supposed to follow to buy or obtain permission to re-present parts of any published news article on our website. So we do not know how long we will be able to keep it posted here for your benefit. We are using it here according to whatever fair-use principles writers still have on their side for the purposes of debate, research and quoting. In the future we will try to provide links to the original article in its entirety once we know where it is located.)
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