Great leap sideways and a little back
How China ensures the world an unending supply of art
There are 1.3 billion people in China, and every one of them who’s any good with a paintbrush works in a squashed little tenement of a “village” called Dafen, actually a hemmed-in suburb of Shenzhen, just across the former border from Hong Kong.
Okay, not every Chinese painter works in Dafen, but upwards of 10,000 do, and their nefarious work is churning out copy after copy after copy of famous artworks. The factories in this four-square-kilometre wedge of a settlement produces five million oil paintings a year for the European and American markets, 90 per cent of them copies.
I have no idea how they manage copyright and licensing. See the rest.
