Biography of great artist steal

A new exhibition at New York’s MoMA features meticulous copies of famous artworks. It raises the question: is originality really that important?

Jason Farago investigates.

On the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, alone on a wall in gallery 18, is one of Jasper Johns’ most famous works: Target with Four Faces, from 1955, featuring a shooting target topped with four plaster casts of noses and mouths.

Biography of great artist steal quote

One storey down, at the end of a hallway on the third floor, there’s another. The same target, the same mouths, the same hinged wooden door: even the most devoted Johns fan might have trouble seeing that it isn’t the real thing.

But it is the real thing, just by another artist. It is Sturtevant’s Johns Target with Four Faces, from 1986 – and just one of dozens of slippery, sinister and perplexing works by an artist who looked like everyone but herself.

“To be a Great Artist is the least interesting thing I can th