ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the potential and the limitations of digitized art objects, and provides some guidelines for creating and assessing high-quality digital surrogates. In 1995, at the dawn of digital photography, Douglas Davis claimed that all “handmade images or words that could be scanned” could now be “endlessly reproduced without degradation, always the same, always perfect.” For the most part, however, the deficiencies of digital surrogates are things that even a state-of-the-art camera cannot rectify. A digital surrogate may capture only select aspects of the original, on the rationale that only those aspects are of interest. At the heart of this issue is the fact that a digital art surrogate forces a particular interpretation of an object. This is most obvious in a restorative digitization, where the supposed original condition of a damaged object is simulated digitally. Careful study of users’ habits when consulting an art object can mitigate this problem, as specific three-dimensional handling procedures can be reproduced digitally.
