I understand there is some evidence that people who are exposed to visual art through technology tend to spend more time with the work when they actually see it live because there's a certain degree of familiarity. They have had the opportunity to study it beforehand. Yet that drawback fades in light of the basic fact of the Internet's freedom from physical bounds. The Internet is the great flowering of that idea. Works of art from around the world, both originals and reproductions, have never been so easy to access-once you actually find what you're looking for.
Reproductions can jog the memory, helping people to recall the original live arts experience.
We know what fire is from having experienced it. When we look at a book and we've seen paintings, the reproductions in the book remind us of the paintings. The Grateful Dead. In that there is a collectivity. The fact that people are plugged into their walkmen all the time, in one sense isolating themselves from the rest of the world, does not mean that they are alone.