Some 500 years prior to that, it was the same story. Renaissance Italy was duplicating endless copies of Greek and Roman artworks, and painters such as Michelangelo and Da Vinci told their underlings to directly copy works of art as a means of learning the trade – a practise that continues in art to this day. The Romans and Greeks created endless replicas of their idols, such as Discobolus, using almost a production-line approach.

All of this was brought to the fore when Gucci's art walls in New York were repainted with visuals for an exhibit called The Artist is Present, which had been lifted from Serbian artist Marina Abramovi?'s landmark 2010 work of the same name, and which is on show at the Yuz Museum Shanghai until December 16. The non-profit museum in the West Bund Xuhui district, owned by Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur, art philanthropist and collector Budi Tek, formerly housed the hangar for the city's Longhua Airport.

Behind The Artist is Present is the show's curator, Italian satirical artist Maurizio Cattelan, who was commissioned by Gucci's creative director and cultural wunderkind Alessandro Michele with an intriguingly brief two-word directive: "Shanghai" and "copy".