[Jewelry making - Article 00005] - Re: [Orchid] Detecting quality

[William Denayer]

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    Michael, so we seem to have established that all these famous bronze
    (and other) sculptures in museums are not hand made ... 

    In my opinion, this makes no sense whatsoever. Your argument is:
    these objects have been casted, by consequence they are not hand
    made. I think that we did invalidate this argument. To be just a bit
    precise: the result of a casting is not a reproduction nor a replica
    and the wax (or the plastic model or whatever) is not the original.
    The reason for this is that casting does not duplicate anything. A
    casting machine differs from a photocopy machine. If you take a
    photocopy of a sheet of paper, the result will be another sheet of
    paper, indeed, a copy of the original sheet. If well done, it will be
    hard to tell which one was the original. Casting, on the other hand
    is a technique which enables you to make an object in a certain
    material and to finalize it in an altogether other material. The wax
    model is not an original in the sense that your sheet of paper is an
    original, because without the possibility of casting the model, it
    would be utterly worthless, indeed, no one would ever make such a
    model. Casting, is a trick, and an extremely intelligent trick: you
    will begin to make your model in a material which can be much more
    easily worked upon than the material in which it will be finally
    realized. It enables you to do things which would be impossible to
    accomplish in the material in which the piece will be realized. Yes,
    the final piece is a reproduction of the wax model, but only if we
    add that the model becomes completely transformed during this
    'reproduction': wax into metal. One 'reproduces' the form of the
    model, but transforms the medium by doing so. Let's not call this a
    reproduction and let's not use it as an argument to say that casted
    pieces are not hand made. 

    We're leaving for Europe soon, and I'm sure that my wife would slap
    me if I would say "Yeah, great, but, you know, this piece isn't hand
    made'. The piece would not be hand made if the wax model would not
    have been hand made or if the casting would not have been manually
    controlled. If the wax (or plaster or whatever) model is hand made
    and the casting is manually controlled, then we have an example of
    something hand made per excellence. Best, Will 



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