‘The McDonald’s of the art world’

In June, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder coughed up $135 million for what might be the highest price ever paid for a painting, a 1907 Gustav Klimt work. He might have just bought a ticket to China instead. 

There, in the southern town of Dafen, artists and their approximations have turned the once sleepy village into the world’s leading producer of replica oil paintings, with some cranking out 30 works a day. Germany’s Spiegel has an excellent piece by Martin Paetsch on the town that exports 5 million paintings a year. Don’t miss the accompanying photo essay.) 

In addition to painting personal requests from buyers, Dafen’s “artists” spend much of their time reproducing famous works like Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, for which you might expect to spend about $40 for a better-than-average copy. Buy 50 of them, and you get a discount.

The cheap cost and quick turnaround attracts buyers from nearby Shenzhen to as far away as London and New York. The Louvre it ain’t. In fact, the process seems more Henry Ford than Henri Matisse:

“[One] businessman is dreaming of industrial mass production, complete with assembly lines. The creation of every painting would be divided into standardized production stages. [He] wants to ‘get into the business of oil paintings the way McDonalds got into the business of fast food.’ By the end of the year, he wants to have set up an art school for training talented new painters — even if mass production doesn’t require all that much talent.”

Just don’t tell Dafen’s resident Picassos that. Even though the professional copy painters are paid by the finished painting (rather than by the hour), spend roughly 12 hours a day at their easels, and often work on more than one piece at once, they “don’t complain,” writes Paetsch. “[One worker says that] ‘It’s much better in a workshop like this one, without a schedule.'” Of course, that probably says more about the alternative.