Bad Horse on Death Is Bad

[Bad Horse]

It's funny that you chose Van Gogh's /Starry Night/ as an example, because I use it as my go-to example of the rare paintings that can't be satisfactorily reproduced with current technology. I explained why in "The Case of the Starry Night" (https://www.fimfiction.net/story/28727/), my Holmes / MLP crossover:

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When I say "stars" and "dark night", however, I give a false impression. The night is certainly dark, yet most of the individual brush strokes contributing to it are from a blue-green palette that could be used for the deep sky of an autumn day. The stars each glow like small, far-off suns, and the night sky is full of bright white stripes that somehow add motion rather than light to the scene, painting the wind.

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Luna's Starry Night, seen in person, is a conclusive argument for the value of museums even in an age of color prints. I had not been overly impressed by the reproductions I had seen of it, and my low expectations no doubt made the thing itself even more stunning. It was painted – constructed, I should say – from layer upon layer of thick oil-paint brush-strokes, so that it was scarcely a painting at all, but a three-dimensional sculpture, with a glossy shine that prints completely fail to capture, producing reflective lines too bright to reproduce which danced madly if one so much as drew breath as one stood before it. It was hard to dispel the illusion of movement, nor did I want to.

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There are also paintings, like Kandinsky's "Black Square", and Mondrian's rectangles, which are better in reproductions, because the small irregularities are very distracting when seen up close. But I don't think much of those paintings.