In the 2013 film Tim’s Vermeer, libertarian actor Penn Gillette documents his friend Tim Jenison’s efforts to reproduce the techniques of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. To this end, Jenison, a software company executive and visual engineer, develops a series of elaborate methods that make use of mirrors and light to replicate Vermeer trademarks like field depth and chromatic aberration.

The film itself is reasonably entertaining, and Jenison’s recreation of Vermeer’s 1660s work The Music Lesson is certainly not unimpressive as an effort in engineering. Both Jenison and Gillette, however, ultimately mistake the creation for something it is not. In the narrow conception of art offered by Tim’s Vermeer, it is simply a technology like anything else — a method, or a series of methods, that aspire to represent reality with as much fidelity as possible. There is no social or cultural process involved, no inspiration beyond an act of mechanical production, and no higher purpose to Vermeer’s own project beyond photorealism.

In his commentary, Gillette gushes about the “photographic” and “cinematic” qualities of Vermeer’s work without ever grappling with its much more interesting and abstract dimensions. “My friend Tim painted a Vermeer! He painted a Vermeer!” Gillette exclaims of something that is no more or less than an extremely elaborate experiment in painting-by-numbers — a derivative simulacrum of something beautiful whose existence misconstrues the very idea of beauty.