cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/questions/p/1261259/if-you-could-create-artistic-works-like-the-mona-lisa-gioconda-in-better-quality-should
I feel like I’ve been thinking about this too much in the last few days.
If you could recreate every drawing in history digitally or in better quality overall, wouldn’t your work be considered superior?
Why the hell isn’t there a nonprofit project that does this already?
Define “better quality”
Mainly, better details, colors and digitalization of the art.
Assuming you mean better than the original, this makes no sense. It seems like you are trying to apply criteria that apply to something that is a capture of the real world, like a photograph or recording, where what is captured is limited by simple quantitative factors like numbers of pixels and shades of color, and light levels.
Art like the Mona Lisa is not a simple snapshot of some real original, and that same criteria does not apply. It is valued for the art and nuances in the use of the media, and its affect on the viewer, not for some objective closeness to some real world original. If you made a version of the Mona Lisa that was more like a photograph of Leonardo’s model, it would be considered worse, not better.
If more details, more accurate colors, and a digital file were enough to consider a work better, then all of the best art would be photographs taken by high-quality cameras. Fidelity can assist in art, but it is not art in and of itself, and increasing fidelity does not necessarily increase the quality of the art (even if it’s done by the original artist).
Remasters are a special case where fidelity is generally considered to be a straight upgrade. Generally, the master holds a relatively accurate representation of the artist’s original vision, but the copies may well be compromised due to limitations (usually technological). If you can overcome those limitations, then you generally should; while e.g. a piece of music on an 8-track cassette is better than nothing, precious few people would actually prefer it to a CD, high-bitrate MP3, or FLAC (or even a compact cassette). Similarly, video games are generally compromised due to system limitations, and games like Star Wars: Dark Forces Remastered really feel like what the creators were trying to make but had to downgrade to get it to actually run on people’s computers.
That description doesn’t apply to art.
I wouldn’t call that better “quality”, I’d call it greater detail. More colours doesn’t automatically equal better and the same is true for details or digitilization