What Cannot Be Reproduced

In May 2026, Mark Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds sold to an undisclosed buyer for $85.78 million (Sotheby’s, 2026). I came across the news with an image of the painting open on my laptop. Seeing it was easy enough; owning the painting was another matter entirely. The contrast was difficult to ignore. Does the widespread reproduction of an artwork undermine the exclusivity of the original, or can it actually help reinforce it?

Today, seeing a work of art rarely requires being in the same room as it. A quick online search can bring up many different reproductions within seconds. Walter Benjamin was writing about an earlier version of this transformation in his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, when technological reproduction had already begun to alter the way artworks could be distributed and experienced (Benjamin, 1936/1968). What disappears in reproduction is what Benjamin calls the artwork’s aura: its presence in a particular place, at a particular moment, and the history attached to the physical object itself. A reproduction may preserve the image, but not the fact of the object having existed, changed hands, aged, and remained the same material thing over time. Benjamin refers to this as the work’s particular “here and now.”

He did not, however, treat that loss as a reason to reject reproduction altogether. Reproduction also gave artworks a new kind of mobility, allowing images to travel far beyond the places in which the originals had previously been encountered. Reproduction, in that sense, did more than weaken the authority of the original; it helped make the circulation of art broader and more democratic, loosening some of the hierarchies that had long determined who could see what.

Since then, the reach of reproductions has expanded dramatically. Reproduction itself was hardly new, but digital media changed the speed and scale at which images could move. Social media and algorithmic circulation push this further still, placing artworks within personalised feeds and changing contexts, meaning that different users may encounter the same work in entirely different ways.

The image had become easier than ever to encounter, while the painting itself remained scarce. At first, I saw these as opposite developments: reproduction brought Rothko to a wider public, while ownership remained concentrated among a much smaller group of collectors. But what if the widespread circulation of the image did not weaken the exclusivity of the original, but helped sustain it?

Once paintings could be reproduced almost endlessly, John Berger argued, the original took on a new kind of authority (Berger, 1972). Its importance became increasingly tied to financial value, even when that value was still framed in terms of culture and civilisation. The original continued to carry a special status, tied not only to its uniqueness but also to its financial and artistic value.

Yet not every original acquires such authority. Pierre Bourdieu describes artistic value as something formed within a larger cultural field. He describes the cultural field as a space in which museums, critics, publishers, and other cultural authorities compete over what is worth recognising (Bourdieu, 1993). Their judgments do not simply reflect an artist’s importance; over time, they help establish it. Bourdieu calls this process consecration: recognition accumulating until certain artists and works come to occupy an established place in the cultural canon. Value, in this sense, does not come from the artwork alone. It also depends on the networks and institutions that recognise and validate it.

Bourdieu links this process of cultural recognition to the market. As the modern art market developed, artists became increasingly dependent on a system in which their work circulated as a commodity. At the same time, artists and writers continued to insist that art could not be reduced to its economic value. The artwork came to occupy two positions at once: it could be bought and sold, but it could also be valued for its symbolic and intellectual meaning. Rothko himself seems to have been uneasy with this tension. John Fischer, who knew him personally, later recalled his frustration at seeing paintings he regarded in almost sacred terms treated as commodities (Fischer, 1970).

The value built around a work is not always obvious from the work itself. Mark Rothko is a particularly revealing example. His paintings are still met with comments such as “I could paint that” or “Why is this considered art?”, a reaction that is hardly new. In 1949, a critic complained that the works seemed to contain no recognisable form or design, repeating the familiar accusation that they looked like paint simply thrown at a canvas (Selz, 1961). Rothko, however, understood these works very differently. His son Christopher later recalled that his father referred to the paintings as “dramas.” They were not, he explains, simply about colour or form, but about “human concerns and human dialogue,” with emotional and psychological tension at their centre (Rothko, 2015).

Rothko had not always painted this way. His early work in 1920s New York centred on figurative subjects: portraits, interiors, scenes of city life. During the 1940s, against the backdrop of World War II and alongside his growing interest in myth and tragedy, he moved steadily away from direct representation. By the mid-1940s, his work was also beginning to appear in more prominent exhibition spaces. In 1945, Peggy Guggenheim gave him a solo exhibition at Art of This Century, and a few years later the Betty Parsons Gallery began showing his work (Selz, 1961). During the 1950s, his work took the form that would come to define him: large fields of colour, stripped of the figures and city scenes that had occupied his earlier work. Over the decades that followed, Rothko’s position within post-war American art became increasingly secure.

Rothko’s death in 1970 fixed the supply of his work, while many important paintings were already held by museums or long-term collections. The highest prices for his work came posthumously. Orange, Red, Yellow sold for $86.9 million in 2012, and No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) reached $98.39 million in 2026 (Christie’s, 2026). By then, a major Rothko appearing at auction had become a relatively rare event, leaving collectors to compete over a very limited number of works.

The limited number of Rothko’s paintings is only part of what explains their extraordinary prices. Scarcity matters because there is already strong demand for the works that remain. Plenty of paintings are unique without becoming valuable, just as countless images circulate widely without making their originals desirable. Rothko’s reputation was built over decades through exhibitions, criticism, collections, and his growing place within art history. Reproductions then gave that reputation a much wider public life. What they could not reproduce was the history of the individual painting, its physical existence, or the fact that Rothko himself had made it. This is where cultural access and economic exclusivity stop looking like opposites. Reproduction allows an artwork to become widely known without making the original any less scarce. In Rothko’s case, the image could become increasingly familiar while ownership of the painting remained highly exclusive.

To say that I had seen Brown and Blacks in Reds on my laptop was therefore true, but only up to a point. The painting is more than two metres tall (Sotheby’s, 2026), and much of what gives Rothko’s work its particular character is difficult to convey in a photograph: the layered paint, the soft boundaries between colours, and the sheer scale of the canvas. There is something about his paintings that is difficult to reduce to an image, a price, or an explanation; some of it only becomes apparent when you are standing in front of them.

I had felt something like this years earlier, watching Mad Men. A newly acquired Rothko hangs in an office while the others discuss it (Mad Men, 2008). Ken Cosgrove stands quietly in front of the painting. He does not try to explain what it means. After a moment, he says, “Maybe you’re just supposed to experience it.” A little later, he describes the feeling as looking into something so deep that “you could fall in.”

References:

• Benjamin, W. (1968 [1936]). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations. Translated by H. Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 217–252. 
• Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. 
• Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited and introduced by R. Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. 
• Christie’s (2026). ‘Christie’s New York surpasses $1.4 billion’. May 2026. https://www.christies.com/en/stories/20th-21st-century-new-york-auction-results-may-2026-711b4e1e516a402898ec8ba45f42123d
• Fischer, J. (1970). ‘The Easy Chair: Mark Rothko, Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Man’. In M. López-Remiro (ed.), Mark Rothko: Writings on Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 130–138.
• Mad Men (2008). ‘The Gold Violin’. Season 2, episode 7. Directed by Andrew Bernstein. AMC, 7 September.
• National Gallery of Art (n.d.). ‘Underground Fantasy, c. 1940’. Accession no. 1986.43.130. https://www.nga.gov/artworks/67488-underground-fantasy
• Rothko, C. (2015). Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 
• Selz, P. (1961). Mark Rothko. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. 
• Sotheby’s (2026). ‘Mark Rothko, Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957)’. Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart, 14 May. https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2026/robert-mnuchin-collector-at-heart-evening-auction/brown-and-blacks-in-reds
• Yale University Press (2016). ‘Illuminating the Ethereal—Mark Rothko’s Work from His Son’s Point of View: Interview with Christopher Rothko by David Ebony’. 11 February. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2016/02/11/illuminating-the-ethereal-mark-rothkos-work-from-his-sons-point-of-view-interview-with-christopher-rothko-by-david-ebony/