One of four versions of Edvard Munch's The Scream (this one, tempera on board) and the less familiar Madonna painting were stolen from an Oslo museum a couple weeks ago. And I have to admit I'm having a hard time giving a damn about The Scream's whereabouts. With an estimated monetary value of about $90 million (that's quickly escalating because of the theft), The Scream's value as a meaningful piece of art was reduced to zero long ago by the masses. Beyond just poster reprints, the image has been reproduced ad infinitum--as a blowup doll, on mouse pads, lifted for advertising purposes, on and on--to the point where its horror has been neutered, its meaning lost and it's hard to believe an "original" even exists.
This hyper-reproduction of The Scream (and others, van Gogh's Starry Night being another casualty of this repurposing effort) describes the simulacra endgame Jean Baudrillard proposes in Simulations where the actual object, or the "real," is no longer significant, having been subsumed and replaced by its reproductions. Given this, assigning personal value to such a ubiquitous work of art becomes difficult. There is something to be said for the preciousness of an original but when the world is filled with a million others, well, it becomes about as precious as a corporate logo.
Some works are worth reproducing, though. While the art world is up in arms about Munch's lost Scream, British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman are planning their next Hell. When the first Hell (a miniature warscape that took two years to make and consisted of 10,000 individually cast and hand-painted figures) was lost in the Saatchi Collection fire last May, the brothers' response was mild: "It's only art--there are worse things happening around the world," they told the UK Guardian Unlimited shortly after the fires. Considered the Chapmans' most important work to date, it was a significant loss for contemporary art. They expect to take two years producing Hell again and will include recent world events in the piece. "There are a lot of things that didn't go into the first Hell. This has given us a second opportunity to revisit it," they said in a recent New York Times interview.
On a telephone pole outside my apartment building, a poster for a missing cat shows an image of The Scream. Previously used to symbolize panic and fear, The Scream is now invested with a new meaning, now standing in for that which is absent.
