In the medium-sized city (population 1.9m) where I live, I can read the same book in the same edition as you do. In the music shops I can buy exactly the same sheet music as you can. We have half a dozen concert halls and the performers play from the same scores as they do in Osaka or Boston or Amsterdam. Our local actors memorise their lines from the same text of Julius Caesar as yours do, and dance companies follow the same models of the classical ballets. All are using copies of texts, scores and charts. The originals are really only for specialists.
However, when I go to the municipal art gallery here, all this changes. It cannot use copies and reproductions. And, since it cannot afford to buy great, or even very good original paintings, in its vast rooms hang poor quality foreign paintings and indiscriminate local work. On the one hand, there is the public library, concert halls, theatres and cinemas. On the other is the public art gallery. The former are universal, the latter is provincial.
I have asked people involved with other undernourished art galleries in cities of this size: why the insistence on showing original specimens? But when I suggest that the best way to get Velazquez into Kansas City (or Bordeaux, Melbourne or Nagoya) is by copy, the exchange seizes up.
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