> I always found this fact fascinating. Why would I attribute different levels of worth to two artifacts that were totally identical, save for their method of c

> I always found this fact fascinating. Why would I attribute different levels of worth to two artifacts that were totally identical, save for their method of construction? You might be interested in Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in which he muses about more or less the same question: What is the difference between the original and an identical copy, made possible due to the technical advantages of our times? Wikipedia has a summary and a link to the complete text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_M...