The Watch In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction

When is an "homage" too close for comfort?

The Massena Lab X Revolution Uni-Racer 1949 may have been different things to different people but one thing’s for sure: It got people talking. It’s not unusual for watch enthusiasts to have strong feelings about a watch – that’s what an enthusiast is, after all; someone with enthusiasm, and we’re a community that can get our knickers in a twist over the most minute details of a watch if they represents the tiniest iota of deviation from what we think the watch should be. That said, and this is not meant to disparage anyone’s views nor anyone’s character, either the people who reacted to the watch or the people who made it, but this was a release as anthropologically interesting as it was horologically interesting.

The whole idea of making watches which are substantially reproductions of previous designs is something that rubs some of us the wrong way at the most fundamental level. Yet it is worth noting at the outset that there are entire brands which essentially make homages to their own designs. That is a very reductive take on what Omega does with the Moonwatch or for that matter, what Rolex does with most of its entire catalogue, but I think that if it were not for the obvious design continuity between a GMT Master from the 1960s and one from today, the line would be less appealing; one brand’s slavish dependence on a few designs is another’s understanding of the value of consistency. The biggest difference between doing an homage watch and simply maintaining production of a decades-old beloved classic is that, to take Rolex again as an example, you are definitely not getting the same watch now that the company was making twenty or thirty years ago. There is a cosmetic similarity and a basic functional continuity but in just about every way that matters, the technical properties of a modern GMT Master II and a vintage one, are changed, not necessarily out of all recognition, but certainly in a way that shows a commitment to technical and practical improvements.

The Uni-Racer 1949 is obviously not a brand homage to one of its own past designs, so what, exactly, is it? Is it plagiarism, or a fake, or some other sort of heinous misrepresentation?

“For Substantially, All Ideas Are Second-Hand.” – Mark Twain

Plagiarism is a word with a long rich history, having been, as far as anyone knows, first used by the poet Martial in the first century AD to complain that another poet had “kidnapped” his verses – “plagiarism” is derived from the Latin “plagiarus” which means “kidnapper.” Plagiarism is a dirty trick, although like so many things that seem to be straightforwardly black and white, the ethics of plagiarism get fuzzier the closer you look (to borrow a phrase used about scientific questions by Mythbusters former host, Adam Savage … Missus Forster didn’t raise no plagiarist). The fact is however that us creative types borrow from each other all the time, and while Andy Warhol may have enshrined copying as a way of parodying all sorts of aspects of traditional high culture stereotypes, it’s probably been going on for as long as hominids have been making images and telling stories, with irony and parody only one of a multitude of motivations.

Mark Twain once wrote a consoling letter to Helen Keller, after she had been accused of plagiarism, and I’m going to quote a fairly big chunk of it even if it is somewhat trying to wade through, because it’s germane to the question and because hey, he’s a decent writer:

“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that ‘plagiarism’ farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

Now, the most clear-cut cases of plagiarism are not examples of unconscious or even deliberate borrowing of visual motifs or neatly turned phrases, but rather, taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. Nowadays, we have new ways of committing this crime, including using chatbots like ChatGPT to steal other people’s work, or in this case, a lot of other people’s work – since large language models have to be trained on the original work of millions of other writers, you might say they represent the industrialization of plagiarism. The word came up in the context of the Uni-Racer 1949 but as co-conspirator Wei Koh pointed out, you can’t have plagiarism, at least not plagiarism de jure, if you aren’t claiming that someone else’s idea actually originated with you.

So if the Uni-Racer 1949 is not de jure plagiarism, is it at least de facto plagiarism? Here things start to get a little murky. Appropriation of someone else’s original work is ubiquitous, but the question of when it is or is not OK depends a lot on the circumstances of individual cases.

Take the question of fake luxury goods, in general, for instance. Their whole raison d’être is not plagiarism, but rather, conspiratorial misrepresentation, in which the maker of the fake (a so-called superfake watch, a so-called “dupe” handbag) and the purchaser both hope to fool people into thinking that they’ve got something they do not. A fake without an audience would be meaningless. This is not something you could get away with, with an original work of art unless of course, it’s a type of work of art reproduced in multiples anyway – photographs for one, prints for another and I’m no expert but I hear Degas bronzes are a minefield. There are different motivations for doing this – if you can buy a convincing fake for a few hundred bucks and sell it as the real thing for thousands or tens of thousands, you’ve got a nice business going, albeit it’s a nakedly criminal enterprise. You can rationalize that anyone who can afford to be defrauded by the sale, to them, of an unnecessary luxury deserves what’s coming to them but this is exactly that: a rationalization. There is also the question of making fakes of things that never existed in the first place – a newly discovered painting by Rembrandt or the Divine Leonardo that turns out to have been created by someone with a lot of talent but little interest in authenticity, for instance; but that is a slightly different can of worms.

Another motivation is to dress yourself in glory without having to pay for it and again, there’s a rationalization ready to hand – you’re getting the social benefits of flaunting a status symbol without earning it, so to speak, which seems like a victimless crime, and it’s hard to feel sorry for multi-billion dollar international luxury conglomerates whose work is being ripped off, until you remember that you don’t know who made the fake, or under what conditions, although the truth is, you could say that about the conditions under which a lot of so-called luxury goods are made as well. As Vinny the explosives expert says in Disney’s Atlantis (played by Don Novello, with a fake Italian accent) “We did a lot of bad things … but nobody got hurt. Well, maybe somebody got hurt, but nobody we knew.” Surprisingly, there are actually communities of superfake enthusiasts who actually love knowing they have a fake, and enjoy sharing the accuracy with which fakers can approximate the real thing with other like-minded enthusiasts. It is always fun to be with a group of people who are in on the same joke, plus I have heard from folks who look into these things that Gen Z in particular loves the idea of stickin’ it to the Man. I don’t think anyone could reasonably argue that the Uni-Racer 1949 is a fake, however. The whole point of the exercise would be lost if either the makers or owners tried to pass it off as the real thing, which is a Patek Philippe steel chronograph, reference 130, from 1949 which is as far as I can tell, probably although not definitely a unique piece. And anyway, nobody could possibly mistake the Uni-Racer for the Patek.

So if the Uni-Racer is not an example of plagiarism, and it’s not a fake, then what is it?

On one level the answer is not particularly complicated. The Uni-Racer is not trying to be anything that it isn’t, which is a modern limited edition (120 pieces) mechanical watch with a modern cam operated Sellita chronograph movement, that has a dial that is as close a facsimile to the original Patek as the makers could get it without making the price too extravagant (the dial is as far as I can tell, the only thing taken from the original, except for of course the naked fact that both are chronographs).

On another level, though, it seems to be symbolically quite a lot more than that to some people and it raised the ire of a significant segment of the collector community, which I thought was interesting because when I first saw pictures of the watch and read the coverage, I didn’t have any particular reaction at all. I’m neither a Patek collector nor a Massena Lab client so aside from the fact that I seem to have an unhealthy interest in wristwatches, I don’t have a dog in the game, and I wondered what it was about the watch that seemed to annoy some folks so much. If it’s not plagiarism, and it’s not a deliberate fake, then it doesn’t seem like it’s doing much harm, if any. I suppose if Patek wanted to it could object on the strength of the design possibly not yet being in the public domain … but as a complete ignoramus when it comes to international copyright and intellectual property laws, I can’t imagine that there is much actual incentive for Patek to pursue damages over someone copying a 74 year old design that was probably only made in one example, even if the copyright is still technically in force. It’s not as if Massena Lab and Revolution making 120 pieces of a four thousand dollar watch based on a design from the way-back catalogue harms Patek’s reputation, or (god knows) bottom line in any way.

The closest thing I can think of to this watch outside of the watch world are so-called kit cars, some of which are reproductions of revered vintage car designs and as far as I know some of the same objections apply to kit cars, in the car community, as to homage watches – this one and others. The gist of the objection is that it’s wrong to profit from someone else’s design, to hell with when the copyright expired, and the corollary to that from the nay-sayers side of the aisle is that it’s a sign of intellectual laziness and creative apathy as well. On the booster’s side of the aisle, you could argue that (a) it is the fate of all works to enter the public domain at some point and (b) that the presence of kit cars and homage watches couldn’t happen without real passion for the watches and cars on the part of the homage creators. You could add to that, that entry of works into the public domain makes broadly culturally significant works available to other creatives so that those works can continue to lead creative lives relevant to contemporary society, although anyone who sat through Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey might have something to say about that.

No, I think that the objection to the Uni-Racer 1949 is deeper than the question of fakes or plagiarism or creative license, and I’m going to drag Walter Benjamin’s The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction kicking and screaming into watch discourse, which I like to do every once in a while because it makes me feel intellectually respectable and I like dressing in borrowed glory as much as the next fellow. Benjamin’s thesis is complicated and I have read the book many times since I read it at fifteen for the first time (which probably tells you more about my tragically lonely adolescence than I ought to be comfortable admitting … if I could go back in time I’d probably tell myself to get outside and enjoy the fresh air a little … which is something I could say to myself, right now, come to think of it). The basic idea is that unique works of art have something he calls an aura – a sort of numinous symbolic spiritual presence that is dependent on the unique place, time, and circumstances of a work of art.

The Sistine Chapel mural is a good case in point – there’s only one and insofar as it was painted by this one guy, during this one period in history, and it’s in this one place (no prizes for guessing where) it has an aura. Reproducing a work of art in multiples can dim the aura of the original and having stood in front of the Mona Lisa, and having found it depressingly anticlimactic, I am inclined to agree with this assessment. The problem that some folks have with the Uni-Racer 1949 is not, I think, that it is an act of plagiarism, nor that it is a fake. Both of these are demonstrably untrue and to defend the watch against accusations of plagiarism as well as to make the accusation in the first place, is to miss a deeper point. Collectors value anything collectible, whether it’s wine, furniture, or postage stamps, to the extent that it is rare and the obsession with vintage watches in particular is based on the aura they possess. This is bound up inextricably with the question of nostalgia but the aura conferred by rarity and exclusivity is I think something you can discuss as a separate question from nostalgia per se. To take a page from Benjamin, we feel an emotional connection to a work of art insofar as it has an aura, which lends it its social utility as an object to which we look for a commonly shared emotional experience. If the Uni-Racer 1949 touched a nerve, maybe it’s partly because some people felt that in reproducing the original, the aura of the original – its presence in the world as a special and even totemic object – had been diluted, and that what was left, after all was said and done, was not a uniquely special work made in a uniquely special time, possessing uniquely special qualities, but merely an object.

PS: Am I the only one who missed that Vyntage announced their own homage to this watch months ago? I’m off my game. Correction: an earlier version of this story said Uni-Matic. The watch is of course the Uni-Racer 1949.