Thanks for the essay, I was hoping you’d write something as I was curious on your take, and I particularly enjoyed your thesis in relation to Walter Benjamin’s work.
I think the ‘aura’ idea is an interesting take, but I’d like to go a bit further and question if, in addition to that, the brand - and its ‘aura’ - that the watch is inspired by has had any effect on opinions reflected, in particular the negative ones?
My point is that this isn’t the first time Massena LAB produces watches that are pretty much facsimiles of known ‘original’ vintage models - e.g. the Geometer (after Rodania) or the Uni-Racer (after Universal Geneve, and a variant of which even made it to GPHG nominations last year) to name a few. And while these did raise similar comments by enthusiasts, in particular die-hard enthusiasts of the brands/models in dedicated online communities, I’m left wondering if the ‘aura’ of the Patek Philippe brand was an accelerant to the heat of the discussions.
Anyway, this will probably blow over (as these things do) but it’s just some food for thought.
That is a very good question and very good point I think. If you do an homage to a watch made by a company which no longer exists or no longer exists in its original form, I think it does feel different than if you bring back a design by a company which is not only still in existence but has a very strong presence and identity in its own right, and not just as a feature in the vintage landscape. I wonder what Benjamin would have made of the whole idea of luxury branding – he was after all a Marxist – but at the same time he always seemed to me anyway, ambivalent about reproduction in art; he seems to have felt that in democratizing art it was a good thing, but that the diminution of what he called aura, was not. It's a separate question but of course, a lot of modern luxury products are at least to some extent, simulations of luxury rather than the real thing.
One of the stickier wickets (that a sharper legal mind than mine will need to chance at some point) is the conflation of copyright, as it pertains to singular artistic works such as novels and paintings—meaning the work as such rather than container medium in which it lives—with intellectual property (IP) as it pertains to industrial designs, which are, by their very nature, meant to be reproduced and marketed at scale. Industrial IP tends to have a shorter timeline (cf. patent expiration), with the notion that technical works moving into the public domain will spurn more research and development and less testing upon one's laurels, whereas copyright for artistic IP is meant to last the lifetime of the author (or thereabouts), notwithstanding the shenanigans of corporations and trusts that seek to extend their exclusivity in perpetuity.
The conversation about copyright and watches tends to reckon these as interchangeable, when, to my understanding, they are meant to be legally distinct.
Jack, my take on Benjamin’s position in luxury would be that it can go either way, because some luxury goods are quasi-mass produced and some are one offs infused with the aura of time, place and social context. Presumably some luxury stuff would have more of the aura (a piece unique) than others (a printed silk scarf). This is the game luxury plays with itself, moving its own borders around and seeing what happens to the luxury experience. A common critique of Banjamin is that he located the aura in the object, whereas most would say the aura arises phenomenologically and socially. This is what may be at the root of the rage over this release — that some folks believe anyone experiencing the aura from the recreation are themselves prone to mistaking a spurious experience for a genuine experience. This the watch appears to be trying a slight of hand, one which the more outspoken critics consider themselves immune. Add bravado and digital distance, and you’ve got at least 50% of the noise around this release. But how do we judge the nature—let alone the validity — of someone else’s experience? No one wants to answer that question, because it will only reveal the flimsiness of believing that only the “genuine article” can really turn someone on. We are left with vague and mostly unarticulated distinctions between high and low brow….which is ultimately not terribly interesting.
Hi Allen, that was pretty brilliant. Thank you. Lots to unpack there especially in your remark about luxury moving its own borders around and I think that the distinction between mass luxury and what I've been calling "true" luxury to myself (it takes as long as it takes and it costs whatever it costs) is definitely worth making in this context. And I agree with the critique of Benjamin's original framing of aura although had he lived, he might well have drawn the distinction between the locating of aura in the object and locating it in the cognitive, phenomenological, and social, since as far as I can read him he was three quarters of the way there anyway.
He sure was, and more generally at that time the idea of phenomenology as a basis for social investigation was only just taking hold. So he was quite current — hell, Benjamin was at the bleeding edge! I’ve been pondering this watch release quite a bit, and I have concluded that the eruption over it appears to boil down to an argument over authenticity. Which is such a slippery subject, and a sticky subject, never resolved, and very subjective (both socially and individually). I’m sitting next to a copy of Trilling’s book on the topic, and am remembering that I never get the answers I want from that essay! Ha! I do feel that people asserting their aesthetic sensibilities pretty much always comes down to asserting the authenticity of their world view, which in turn is a bid for cultural capital in whatever scene they care to be deemed worthy. Why this specific watch caught so much heat in our little corner of aesthetic concern — no idea, as Massena has a history of exactly this kind of release, and there’s nothing especially unique about this release within the sub genre of LE homage/tribute watches. Maybe it’s just a VERY HOT SUMMER! Maybe just a chain reaction kicked off somewhere in super-hot New Mexico. Nuclear!
This take somehow gets Massena & Koh "off the hook" a little bit in my mind, if only because of my soft spots for not only Disneyland, but also for strip malls and the like. Bravo!
I appreciate the inclusion of aura in the whole affair and think it's something to ponder when it comes to re-issues. Is a brand stealing its own mojo in a way by dragging something out of a back catalogue only to almost copy it entirely?
When it comes specifically to the whole Revolution/Massena controversy, I respectfully think you missed the boat a bit. The meat of the argument to me wasn't plagiarism, as I think most people moved passed that rather quickly (aside from the armchair lawyers who love to beat semantics into the ground) and certainly wasn't fakes, as I saw essentially no one outright calling it that. But instead the way the whole thing was handled by Koh and Co. Claiming to democratize via something that is a LE of 120 is laughable, bringing a strange aggro machismo of power slapping people you don't agree with, and saying that it's fine simply because Patek didn't tell you "no" is all in extremely poor taste. These things, at least in my corner of the internet, were the real issue.
One last closing thought is that a repeated justification was given of the current owner giving permission and being sent a prototype. This is pretty bizarre to me given that owners of art don't have any sorts of reproduction rights unless explicitly stated. As well as being a pretty slippery slope for trying to justify something like this.
Well I take your point although I wanted to try and focus on the watch as a symbolic object and the reproduction as a symbolic act rather than on the tone of how it was handled. In general I think sticking to your guns is a good thing, but my professional career is strewn with instances of problematic PR moments that I would have handled differently. Of course, I never had to handle on in person, so I have the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking and second guessing without having to risk anything.
I definitely appreciate your writing and how you're coming from different place with this affair. Once again thank you for bring up aura as that's something I haven't see defined like that before. Always fun to learn new things which is why I follow you in the first place!
You see, you should keep going; the Massena isn't one of Benjamin's reproduced pieces of art, as much as it is one of Baudrillard's Simulacra - a copy that has no original. It is visually referential and is, as you say, a chronograph, but it is otherwise an unremarkable, unoriginal timepiece with no connection to the predecessor everyone loves so much. And, if we want to keep going, we might describe the fabrication process for this watch (with meetings over "colorways," surely involved) as a simulation of the processes that led the the Patek - that is to say a poor imitation that has no relationship to the artistry and the craft of 1949, but somehow results in something similar.
And that's why the interested parties are mad - because the new watch forces us to reflect on our reverence for the old. I can call this new one unoriginal and the process to create it a counterfeit of virtuosity, but is it? Does not this relatively remarkable movement and this lovely dial not make a mockery of the abilities of the ancient technologies? Is our veneration maybe just some commoditized nostalgia?
It bothers me when folks cosplay as something they're not — wearing a cowboy hat non-ironically despite not being able to ride a horse, using genuine Army special forces equipment, etc. Why recreate something if there's already an original? Shouldn't we find newer solutions to old problems or better yet, new problems to solve?
PS - I love that everyone is thinking hard about this right now — to wit, Tony Traina's recent couple of Dink articles about restoration and nostalgia, Chris Hall's recent musings on homages (full disclosure: I submitted the question he so kindly answered)
Tony's article was terrific and I think should be required reading, the whole idea of restoration is so rich for more sophisticated discussion. I take your point about people and things cosplaying as something they are not and wonder how far we could take this – should only divers wear diver's watches, should only pilots wear pilot's watches? I've always loved that a couple of decades ago Walt Odets described the Mark XII as "every non-pilot's favorite pilot's watch" (and I still want one, especially the platinum Mark XII with the blue dial).
My instinct was: wow that dial is amazing, if its in the x-1k price region i'll buy it right now etc. But as Dalton mentioned here, the limited edition is very disappointing and misses the democratisation of art that should be the point of the whole thing.
Right now I'm looking at a Picasso in my office; great art deserves to be seen.
Has anyone else noticed how the Chinese or Singapore watch companies are following these homages closely and doing their own similar ones? They look pretty close in my experience and certainly scratch the itch so to speak. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005265881081.html
The mapping to to W.Benjamin was really well done... a fun read, thank you! I do think a larger driver of the reaction was about how the mainstream watch media take the community for fools… When Vyntage launched this exact watch did Hodinkee congratulate them, or did Revolution write about it? You mentioned kit cars... are these ever prominently featured on mainstream car media, and celebrated or congratulated? On the other hand, similar ‘inspired’ watches like Furlan Marri, are winning GPHG awards... it just seems like a bit of a nepo game, where the end users are treated like mugs, and perhaps this time, coupled with Wei Koh's reaction, the perfect storm was created.
you know whats really annoying - writing a comment, submitting it, and then scrolling to the end of the chain to see someone wrote almost exactly the same thing a day earlier.
On reflection while we both referenced Massina and Furlan Marri, Wei Koh is also a name that keeps surfacing and I wonder if thats also adding a bit of spice to the mix. I cant find the exact quote but I recall there was quite the stir when he gave the guys from Baltic, another recycler of the past, a glowing tribute as the designers of the generation or something.
Maybe this isnt following the Godfather rule - it isnt just business, its personal.
I agreed with your point and most designs are to a certain degree referential, but recycling the past, as you put it, is not the same as literally copy-pasting it, which is the case for this dial as well as a few previous Massena watches.
Reading some longer form discussion around this topic I feel like there is another consideration driving some of the angst - a sense that something (the homage/knock-off) that has only ever been tolerated appears to now being celebrated. To use your kit car analogy, its one thing to build one, its another to turn up at a local town show, its something completely different to see a kit car in the competition at Pebble Beach.
Adding some hot sauce to the arguement is the feeling that Massena (and Furlan Marri) are leveraging friendships, networks, personal histories to bestow a fig leaf of respectability to something that previously would have sunk without a trace in the affordable end of the market.
I feel its less the lazy design than the power behind celebration of the laziness thats at the heart of this.
Really interesting point about the “aura”, it definitely got me thinking beyond the topic at hand. For me, like many others, the issue is perhaps more that what Massena does isn’t so different from a Dan Henry or Steinhart. However, the asking price of his “homage” is significantly higher, making the Revolution argument about approachability a little tone deaf. I believe most people are happy to discard homage watches as cheap copies, but will have a problem when these “lazy designs” (borrowing other people’s words) are sold at a premium, and even nominated for top horological prizes. In my humble opinion, the whole notion of value in relationship to design originality would be worth exploring in a follow up article :)
The dial is a copy, plain and simple. Had a nobody from China created this watch, it would have gone unnoticed, with no media coverage, and no one would have bought it. But because this was from Massena and through the powers within of Revolution, it was hyped up and peddled to us collectors, as if we were fools for the taking. What I took offend with was that for a company as resource rich as Massena and Revolution, they decided to take the easy way out and launch a watch that requires minimal creative effort and not bat an eyelid about the ethical and moral repercussions that followed. To make things worse, their friends in the mainstream watch media too thinks that such acts are to be celebrated and promoted to their audience. Such degenerative behaviours saddens me and blatantly paints a cash grab scene that has disgusted many collectors.
The classic high end column wheel chronograph is a sacred space for watch enthusiasts.
Watches that break into this sacred space, armed with nothing more than mass produced 7750-esque movements, are ill-equipped to ward off the righteous criticism coming their way.
"Aura" is an interesting idea, but I couldn't disagree more strongly with Walter Benjamin. Someone in the 1930's could be forgiven for predicting that reproduction of images would diminish the 'aura' of an original item, but in the 21st century that notion is preposterous. Just stand in line to get into the Louvre to stand in a huge crowd in front of a painting that anybody can see on the device in their pocket. The crowd is there *because* of the reproductions, not despite of them.
Ironically if you put the name of the original company on the packaging of a generic drug whose patent has expired, even if you were just trying to give credit to avoid being a plagiarist, you would likely be sued for trademark infringement.
There is a gross elitism behind this. Sure there is something distasteful about someone that cannot afford a Rolex (or could but just does not want to spend the money - sure buddy) wearing a fake Rolex. But nobody is going to think this is a Patek. Very few people would realize the original is a Patek unless they were able to read the small print on the dial. This is just democratizing an interesting dial design.
For anyone who doubts the gross elitism look at when it goes the other was. Anyone criticizing MB&F for being heavily inspired by the Amida Digitrend? No. Anyone criticizing Moser for being even more on the nose in ways where Apple could have possibly taken trademark or design patent action? No.
But how dare the poors buying Revolution to burn in their garbage cans to keep warm, and in the process noticing this watch release, get a cool, historic dial design.
Another good read, but you've got "Uni-Matic 1949" used nine times when it should read "Uni-Racer 1949"
Caught that belatedly, fixed in the story and thank you
Thanks for the essay, I was hoping you’d write something as I was curious on your take, and I particularly enjoyed your thesis in relation to Walter Benjamin’s work.
I think the ‘aura’ idea is an interesting take, but I’d like to go a bit further and question if, in addition to that, the brand - and its ‘aura’ - that the watch is inspired by has had any effect on opinions reflected, in particular the negative ones?
My point is that this isn’t the first time Massena LAB produces watches that are pretty much facsimiles of known ‘original’ vintage models - e.g. the Geometer (after Rodania) or the Uni-Racer (after Universal Geneve, and a variant of which even made it to GPHG nominations last year) to name a few. And while these did raise similar comments by enthusiasts, in particular die-hard enthusiasts of the brands/models in dedicated online communities, I’m left wondering if the ‘aura’ of the Patek Philippe brand was an accelerant to the heat of the discussions.
Anyway, this will probably blow over (as these things do) but it’s just some food for thought.
That is a very good question and very good point I think. If you do an homage to a watch made by a company which no longer exists or no longer exists in its original form, I think it does feel different than if you bring back a design by a company which is not only still in existence but has a very strong presence and identity in its own right, and not just as a feature in the vintage landscape. I wonder what Benjamin would have made of the whole idea of luxury branding – he was after all a Marxist – but at the same time he always seemed to me anyway, ambivalent about reproduction in art; he seems to have felt that in democratizing art it was a good thing, but that the diminution of what he called aura, was not. It's a separate question but of course, a lot of modern luxury products are at least to some extent, simulations of luxury rather than the real thing.
One of the stickier wickets (that a sharper legal mind than mine will need to chance at some point) is the conflation of copyright, as it pertains to singular artistic works such as novels and paintings—meaning the work as such rather than container medium in which it lives—with intellectual property (IP) as it pertains to industrial designs, which are, by their very nature, meant to be reproduced and marketed at scale. Industrial IP tends to have a shorter timeline (cf. patent expiration), with the notion that technical works moving into the public domain will spurn more research and development and less testing upon one's laurels, whereas copyright for artistic IP is meant to last the lifetime of the author (or thereabouts), notwithstanding the shenanigans of corporations and trusts that seek to extend their exclusivity in perpetuity.
The conversation about copyright and watches tends to reckon these as interchangeable, when, to my understanding, they are meant to be legally distinct.
Jack, my take on Benjamin’s position in luxury would be that it can go either way, because some luxury goods are quasi-mass produced and some are one offs infused with the aura of time, place and social context. Presumably some luxury stuff would have more of the aura (a piece unique) than others (a printed silk scarf). This is the game luxury plays with itself, moving its own borders around and seeing what happens to the luxury experience. A common critique of Banjamin is that he located the aura in the object, whereas most would say the aura arises phenomenologically and socially. This is what may be at the root of the rage over this release — that some folks believe anyone experiencing the aura from the recreation are themselves prone to mistaking a spurious experience for a genuine experience. This the watch appears to be trying a slight of hand, one which the more outspoken critics consider themselves immune. Add bravado and digital distance, and you’ve got at least 50% of the noise around this release. But how do we judge the nature—let alone the validity — of someone else’s experience? No one wants to answer that question, because it will only reveal the flimsiness of believing that only the “genuine article” can really turn someone on. We are left with vague and mostly unarticulated distinctions between high and low brow….which is ultimately not terribly interesting.
Hi Allen, that was pretty brilliant. Thank you. Lots to unpack there especially in your remark about luxury moving its own borders around and I think that the distinction between mass luxury and what I've been calling "true" luxury to myself (it takes as long as it takes and it costs whatever it costs) is definitely worth making in this context. And I agree with the critique of Benjamin's original framing of aura although had he lived, he might well have drawn the distinction between the locating of aura in the object and locating it in the cognitive, phenomenological, and social, since as far as I can read him he was three quarters of the way there anyway.
He sure was, and more generally at that time the idea of phenomenology as a basis for social investigation was only just taking hold. So he was quite current — hell, Benjamin was at the bleeding edge! I’ve been pondering this watch release quite a bit, and I have concluded that the eruption over it appears to boil down to an argument over authenticity. Which is such a slippery subject, and a sticky subject, never resolved, and very subjective (both socially and individually). I’m sitting next to a copy of Trilling’s book on the topic, and am remembering that I never get the answers I want from that essay! Ha! I do feel that people asserting their aesthetic sensibilities pretty much always comes down to asserting the authenticity of their world view, which in turn is a bid for cultural capital in whatever scene they care to be deemed worthy. Why this specific watch caught so much heat in our little corner of aesthetic concern — no idea, as Massena has a history of exactly this kind of release, and there’s nothing especially unique about this release within the sub genre of LE homage/tribute watches. Maybe it’s just a VERY HOT SUMMER! Maybe just a chain reaction kicked off somewhere in super-hot New Mexico. Nuclear!
Maybe Baudrillards concepts of simulacra and simulation would be equally appropriate to describe what is going on here.
See this is what I like about having a substack, nobody ever brings up Baudrillard on effin' Instagram 🔥
This take somehow gets Massena & Koh "off the hook" a little bit in my mind, if only because of my soft spots for not only Disneyland, but also for strip malls and the like. Bravo!
I appreciate the inclusion of aura in the whole affair and think it's something to ponder when it comes to re-issues. Is a brand stealing its own mojo in a way by dragging something out of a back catalogue only to almost copy it entirely?
When it comes specifically to the whole Revolution/Massena controversy, I respectfully think you missed the boat a bit. The meat of the argument to me wasn't plagiarism, as I think most people moved passed that rather quickly (aside from the armchair lawyers who love to beat semantics into the ground) and certainly wasn't fakes, as I saw essentially no one outright calling it that. But instead the way the whole thing was handled by Koh and Co. Claiming to democratize via something that is a LE of 120 is laughable, bringing a strange aggro machismo of power slapping people you don't agree with, and saying that it's fine simply because Patek didn't tell you "no" is all in extremely poor taste. These things, at least in my corner of the internet, were the real issue.
One last closing thought is that a repeated justification was given of the current owner giving permission and being sent a prototype. This is pretty bizarre to me given that owners of art don't have any sorts of reproduction rights unless explicitly stated. As well as being a pretty slippery slope for trying to justify something like this.
Well I take your point although I wanted to try and focus on the watch as a symbolic object and the reproduction as a symbolic act rather than on the tone of how it was handled. In general I think sticking to your guns is a good thing, but my professional career is strewn with instances of problematic PR moments that I would have handled differently. Of course, I never had to handle on in person, so I have the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking and second guessing without having to risk anything.
I definitely appreciate your writing and how you're coming from different place with this affair. Once again thank you for bring up aura as that's something I haven't see defined like that before. Always fun to learn new things which is why I follow you in the first place!
You see, you should keep going; the Massena isn't one of Benjamin's reproduced pieces of art, as much as it is one of Baudrillard's Simulacra - a copy that has no original. It is visually referential and is, as you say, a chronograph, but it is otherwise an unremarkable, unoriginal timepiece with no connection to the predecessor everyone loves so much. And, if we want to keep going, we might describe the fabrication process for this watch (with meetings over "colorways," surely involved) as a simulation of the processes that led the the Patek - that is to say a poor imitation that has no relationship to the artistry and the craft of 1949, but somehow results in something similar.
And that's why the interested parties are mad - because the new watch forces us to reflect on our reverence for the old. I can call this new one unoriginal and the process to create it a counterfeit of virtuosity, but is it? Does not this relatively remarkable movement and this lovely dial not make a mockery of the abilities of the ancient technologies? Is our veneration maybe just some commoditized nostalgia?
well shit - Jens beat me to it!
It bothers me when folks cosplay as something they're not — wearing a cowboy hat non-ironically despite not being able to ride a horse, using genuine Army special forces equipment, etc. Why recreate something if there's already an original? Shouldn't we find newer solutions to old problems or better yet, new problems to solve?
PS - I love that everyone is thinking hard about this right now — to wit, Tony Traina's recent couple of Dink articles about restoration and nostalgia, Chris Hall's recent musings on homages (full disclosure: I submitted the question he so kindly answered)
Tony's article was terrific and I think should be required reading, the whole idea of restoration is so rich for more sophisticated discussion. I take your point about people and things cosplaying as something they are not and wonder how far we could take this – should only divers wear diver's watches, should only pilots wear pilot's watches? I've always loved that a couple of decades ago Walt Odets described the Mark XII as "every non-pilot's favorite pilot's watch" (and I still want one, especially the platinum Mark XII with the blue dial).
My instinct was: wow that dial is amazing, if its in the x-1k price region i'll buy it right now etc. But as Dalton mentioned here, the limited edition is very disappointing and misses the democratisation of art that should be the point of the whole thing.
Right now I'm looking at a Picasso in my office; great art deserves to be seen.
Fascinating article Thank you.
Has anyone else noticed how the Chinese or Singapore watch companies are following these homages closely and doing their own similar ones? They look pretty close in my experience and certainly scratch the itch so to speak. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005265881081.html
or https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005839266388.html
Of course the QC etc is not as good . Andrew @lidotax
Wow, thanks for the link. Talk about too close for comfort 😀
The mapping to to W.Benjamin was really well done... a fun read, thank you! I do think a larger driver of the reaction was about how the mainstream watch media take the community for fools… When Vyntage launched this exact watch did Hodinkee congratulate them, or did Revolution write about it? You mentioned kit cars... are these ever prominently featured on mainstream car media, and celebrated or congratulated? On the other hand, similar ‘inspired’ watches like Furlan Marri, are winning GPHG awards... it just seems like a bit of a nepo game, where the end users are treated like mugs, and perhaps this time, coupled with Wei Koh's reaction, the perfect storm was created.
you know whats really annoying - writing a comment, submitting it, and then scrolling to the end of the chain to see someone wrote almost exactly the same thing a day earlier.
a special irony given the topic at hand
No original thought, eh! 😂
Apparently none whatsoever.
On reflection while we both referenced Massina and Furlan Marri, Wei Koh is also a name that keeps surfacing and I wonder if thats also adding a bit of spice to the mix. I cant find the exact quote but I recall there was quite the stir when he gave the guys from Baltic, another recycler of the past, a glowing tribute as the designers of the generation or something.
Maybe this isnt following the Godfather rule - it isnt just business, its personal.
I agreed with your point and most designs are to a certain degree referential, but recycling the past, as you put it, is not the same as literally copy-pasting it, which is the case for this dial as well as a few previous Massena watches.
Jack - thanks for the essay, really enjoyed it.
Reading some longer form discussion around this topic I feel like there is another consideration driving some of the angst - a sense that something (the homage/knock-off) that has only ever been tolerated appears to now being celebrated. To use your kit car analogy, its one thing to build one, its another to turn up at a local town show, its something completely different to see a kit car in the competition at Pebble Beach.
Adding some hot sauce to the arguement is the feeling that Massena (and Furlan Marri) are leveraging friendships, networks, personal histories to bestow a fig leaf of respectability to something that previously would have sunk without a trace in the affordable end of the market.
I feel its less the lazy design than the power behind celebration of the laziness thats at the heart of this.
Really interesting point about the “aura”, it definitely got me thinking beyond the topic at hand. For me, like many others, the issue is perhaps more that what Massena does isn’t so different from a Dan Henry or Steinhart. However, the asking price of his “homage” is significantly higher, making the Revolution argument about approachability a little tone deaf. I believe most people are happy to discard homage watches as cheap copies, but will have a problem when these “lazy designs” (borrowing other people’s words) are sold at a premium, and even nominated for top horological prizes. In my humble opinion, the whole notion of value in relationship to design originality would be worth exploring in a follow up article :)
The dial is a copy, plain and simple. Had a nobody from China created this watch, it would have gone unnoticed, with no media coverage, and no one would have bought it. But because this was from Massena and through the powers within of Revolution, it was hyped up and peddled to us collectors, as if we were fools for the taking. What I took offend with was that for a company as resource rich as Massena and Revolution, they decided to take the easy way out and launch a watch that requires minimal creative effort and not bat an eyelid about the ethical and moral repercussions that followed. To make things worse, their friends in the mainstream watch media too thinks that such acts are to be celebrated and promoted to their audience. Such degenerative behaviours saddens me and blatantly paints a cash grab scene that has disgusted many collectors.
The classic high end column wheel chronograph is a sacred space for watch enthusiasts.
Watches that break into this sacred space, armed with nothing more than mass produced 7750-esque movements, are ill-equipped to ward off the righteous criticism coming their way.
"Aura" is an interesting idea, but I couldn't disagree more strongly with Walter Benjamin. Someone in the 1930's could be forgiven for predicting that reproduction of images would diminish the 'aura' of an original item, but in the 21st century that notion is preposterous. Just stand in line to get into the Louvre to stand in a huge crowd in front of a painting that anybody can see on the device in their pocket. The crowd is there *because* of the reproductions, not despite of them.
Ironically if you put the name of the original company on the packaging of a generic drug whose patent has expired, even if you were just trying to give credit to avoid being a plagiarist, you would likely be sued for trademark infringement.
There is a gross elitism behind this. Sure there is something distasteful about someone that cannot afford a Rolex (or could but just does not want to spend the money - sure buddy) wearing a fake Rolex. But nobody is going to think this is a Patek. Very few people would realize the original is a Patek unless they were able to read the small print on the dial. This is just democratizing an interesting dial design.
For anyone who doubts the gross elitism look at when it goes the other was. Anyone criticizing MB&F for being heavily inspired by the Amida Digitrend? No. Anyone criticizing Moser for being even more on the nose in ways where Apple could have possibly taken trademark or design patent action? No.
But how dare the poors buying Revolution to burn in their garbage cans to keep warm, and in the process noticing this watch release, get a cool, historic dial design.