Yeah, there are plenty of very famous castings and reproductions of historical artefacts around the world - and they serve as invaluable reminders of the history of research and the creation of museums while also showing off the things they’re reproducing, which makes them super interesting artefacts on their own, but also a direct consequence of when and how they were created and how the world has changed since. While no doubt we could create better reproductions today (in various ways), they’d also pretty much only be copies (unless you’re interested in talking about the contemporary production of museum grade replicas, which would no doubt be super fascinating, but not the same thing). And reproductions have tons of advantages through one simple fact: they’re not as valuable as the original, so they afford doing new things - not only loaning them to other museums and shipping them around the globe without supervillain levels of security, but you can be “creative” with them - for example by painting statues or carvings to match the original, vivid colorings of ancient Greek or Roman statuary, or convey how some paintings by old masters were significantly changed during the creation process (elements added or taken out, compositions changed, etc.) or even painted on top of already used canvasses. But that kind of work also doesn’t strictly require the same attention to detail in the reproduction, thankfully making it a lot cheaper. And a lot of it can even be done digitally (though physical reproductions always convey things better in the end). All this to say, I absolutely don’t think reproductions have no place in museums - I’d argue they are hugely important in their own right - they just can’t fully replace originals.
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Hm. I don’t think the owl could do much against a burning bush, but maybe she could use the spear to beat out the flames?
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