Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy

Fabien Bièvre-Perrin

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Fabien Bièvre-Perrin. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Thersites (Mainz), 2021, 13, https://thersites-journal.de/index.php/thr/article/view/191. 10.34679/thersites.vol13.191 . hal-04297782

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Distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - Attribution - International License
JOURNAL FOR TRANSCULTURAL PRESENCES &
DIACHRONIC IDENTITIES FROM ANTIQUITY TO DATE

thersites

13/2021

Fabien Bièvre-Perrin (Ed.)

Antiquipop

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www.thersites-journal.de
# Imprint

## Universität Potsdam 2021

Historisches Institut, Professur Geschichte des Altertums
Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam (Germany)
https://www.thersites-journal.de/

## Editors

PD Dr. Annemarie Ambühl (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)

Prof. Dr. Filippo Carlà-Uhink (Universität Potsdam)

Dr. Christian Rollinger (Universität Trier)

Prof. Dr. Christine Walde (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)

ISSN 2364-7612

## Contact

### Principal Contact

Prof. Dr. Filippo Carlà-Uhink
Email: thersitesjournal@uni-potsdam.de

### Support Contact

Dr. Christian Rollinger
Email: thersitesjournal@uni-potsdam.de

## Layout and Typesetting

text plus form, Dresden

## Cover pictures:

Fabien Bièvre-Perrin, visuals for the 2019 Antiquipop program,
based on photographs of plaster casts of the Laocoon and the Great Altar
of Pergamum at the Musée des moulages de Lyon, 2018

## Published online at:

https://doi.org/10.34679/thersites.vol13

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License:
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
This does not apply to quoted content from other authors.
To view a copy of this license visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
FABIEN BIÈVRE-PERRIN

(Université de Lorraine, HISCANT-MA, F-54000 Nancy, France)

# “Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”

## Preface

A quote from *Fight Club* (Chuck Palahniuk, 1996) may seem unusual for a Classicist. Nevertheless, this famous sentence summarises the contents of this special issue of *thersites* perfectly. As specialists in classical reception frequently witness, there is a sort of *déjà-vu* effect when it comes to the presence of Antiquity within popular culture. Countless versions of the Laocoon and the Venus de Milo coexist, from the most faithful reproductions to the most eccentric re-interpretations. Since 2015, the project *Antiquipop* has analysed and inventoried the presence of antiquity in contemporary popular culture: from the authors and speakers who contributed to the blog, the first symposium, to the various events over the years – all have clearly highlighted this trend.<fnref n="1" /> Indeed, postmodernism, mass culture and social networks have accelerated this ancient phenomenon to the extreme. One can wonder why so many creators build such an army of clones. How do they seek originality and how do they confer an *aura* to their work of art, making it more than a reproduction?<fnref n="2" /> In 2019, to try to better under-

<footnote n="1">1 Antiquipop: https://antiquipop.hypotheses.org/; Fabien Bièvre-Perrin & Élise Pampanay (eds), *Antiquipop: la référence à l'Antiquité dans la culture populaire contemporaine. Actes du colloque 2016* (Lyon: MOM Editions, 2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.momeditions.3299.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 On reproductions and the *aura* of works of art, see Walter Benjamin, *The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction* (1935).</footnote>
“Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1** Poster of the fourth “season” of Antiquipop, Fabien Bièvre-Perrin.</figcaption></figure>
stand the phenomenon, Antiquipop invited researchers to take an interest in the
construction and semantic path of these “masterpieces” in contemporary pop-
ular culture, with a particular focus on the 21st century.

This volume brings together the proceedings of a seminar organised in the first half of 2019 (1 February–24 May) in Lyon as well as the output from the congress organised in Toulouse on June 1 of the same year with the support of LabexMed. The Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon welcomed Manon Renault for her talk about fashion, while the Musée des moulages de Lyon offered the perfect backdrop for Isabelle Jouteur’s lecture on the Laocoon, as well as guided tours of the museum led by Tiphaine Annabelle Besnard and myself. The congress was hosted by the Musée Saint Raymond as part of the events surrounding the exhibition *Age Of Classics* (22 February – 22 September 2019), curated by Tiphaine Annabelle Besnard and Mathieu Scapin. I would like to thank all these institutions for supporting and welcoming our events in such ideal and fitting settings.

The proposals Antiquipop received in response to its call for papers easily
confirmed the special status of five ancient works that have become iconic.
Three of them have been known for a long time and as such form part of an ex-
tensive tradition: the Laocoon (1506), the Venus de Milo (1820) and the Victory
of Samothrace (1863). These are used in popular culture so often that establish-
ing an exhaustive catalogue of their recurrences has become unthinkable. Their
whiteness and incompleteness have fuelled their aura and made them icons of
classicism, a process now questioned.<fnref n="3" /> The two Riace Warriors, in polychrome
bronze, have a shorter contemporary history since they were only discovered
on the shores of Calabria in 1972. The circumstances of their discovery, their ex-
ceptional state of preservation and their quality made them immediately famous.
Their popular reception is mostly traceable to Italy, in particular in Calabria and
Reggio Calabria, where they are now preserved.

While these five works differ in their artistic, historical and technical aspects,
they illustrate common reception phenomena exclusive to a very restricted club
of classical statues, among which the Discobolus or the Apollo of Belvedere
could also be have been discussed.<fnref n="4" /> Of course, not all facets of these master-
pieces could be covered by the contributors. Several volumes would be neces-

<footnote n="3">3 Philippe Jockey, *Le mythe de la Grèce blanche: Histoire d'un rêve occidental* (Paris: Belin, 2015). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/bel.jocke.2015.01.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 The club could also be opened to non Graeco-Roman works, such as Nefertiti's bust; Fabien Bièvre-Perrin, 'Nefertiti, a queen for the XXIst century', in Penelope Kolovou, Richard Cole &</footnote>
“Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”

sary for such an undertaking. Given its central place, the Laocoon is the subject
of two quite different and complementary approaches. Michel Briand looks at
it as a queer and camp icon, questioning aesthetic, cultural and political issues,
while Isabelle Jouteur focuses on its status as a muse of contemporary art. The
Victory of Samothrace is examined by Élise Pampanay who seeks to decode the
meanings and symbolism of its latest reinterpretations, focusing for example
on contemporary art by Omar Hassan or Xu Zhen as well as the music videos
of Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Through the Venus de Milo, Tiphaine-Annabelle Besnard
explores hyper-artistic practices in modern and contemporary art and how they
remade the famous statue into a “palimpsest object”. Finally, Daniela Costanzo
offers a deep analysis of the fate of the Riace Bronzes in contemporary culture,
especially in Calabria where they play a central political role, covering a wide
range of issues, from tourism exploitation to the migrant crisis, to which the two
bronzes are regularly linked.

The second half of the volume is devoted to analyses that do not focus on specific works, but on a more diffuse and abstract reception of Classical Art. Manon Renault deals with fashion, from *haute couture* to *prêt-à-porter* and shows how classical models keep influencing designers and shaping trends. Arnaud Saura Ziegelmeyer deals with the difficult subject of sound and asks how, in the absence of models, the contemporary imagination has approached ancient music and created new *clichés*, and what these can tell us about our society? Finally, Mathieu Scapin offers a vast panorama devoted to comics, the widespread presence of ancient models, whether famous or not, and their multiples uses.

This volume shows to what extent the same phenomenon, the repetitiveness
of classical models in recent popular culture, is nourished by various phenome-
na and intentions. If an appeal to the collective imagination, itself nourished by
numerous previous reinterpretations, seems to have motivated most of the cre-
ators, these masterpieces and their history are also put into perspective to con-
secrate them as models as well as to question their role and their impact on
today's societies and ways of thinking. Somewhat paradoxically, each new ver-
sion reinforces the iconic status of the original work and its *aura*. To clarify the
extent, the mechanisms, and the effects of the phenomenon, it will surely be ap-
propriate in the future to devote a consequent collective and interdisciplina-
ry effort to one of these masterpieces, for example the Laocoon or the victory

Markus Stachon (eds), *Classical Antiquity in Our World* (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, forthcoming).
of Samothrace, which have found further success in recent popular and mainstream culture.<fnref n="5" />

Fabien Bièvre-Perrin
HISCANT-MA, Centre Edouard Will
Université de Lorraine
23 boulevard Albert 1er
54015 Nancy
fabien.bievre-perrin@univ-lorraine.fr

**Suggested citation**

Fabien Bièvre-Perrin, Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy [preface]. In: thersites 13 (2021): Antiquipop, pp. i-v.
https://doi.org/10.34679/thersites.vol13.191

<footnote n="5">5 Many thanks to Lorna Richardson for her careful proofreading and corrections.</footnote>
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