Peter Hessler, at the New Yorker, discusses the practice of outsourcing art to China. According to Hessler, Chinese people, mostly from the countryside, are trained to paint copies of photographs or paintings en masse and those paintings are sold to tourists elsewhere in the world.

Painters pose in their workspace:

1

Paintings to be sold as souvenirs somewhere in the American West:

2

4

Venice?

3

5

See more at the slide show.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.