The awesome power of unoriginal art

Plus: The value of a Cédric Grolet shopping bag

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Welcome back to Pursuits Weekly, our look at the world's biggest culture stories, as well as ideas and recommendations around travel, dining and art. Sign up here to get this newsletter every Saturday in your inbox. Reboots FTW Margot Robbie, the latest in a long line of Catherine Earnshaws. Source: Warner Bros. Pictures Originality is overrated. As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, people love the familiar. And that applies not only to restaurants but also stories. As any parent will attest, children from an early age want to be told the same tales over and over — and over — again. Grown-ups might like a little more variety to their retellings, but our predisposition to the unoriginal is eternal. There's a reason why shopworn tropes are so shopworn! In Hollywood, beloved stories and characters are unsexily referred to as intellectual property, and are worth billions. With a few notable exceptions, such as Sinners, original ideas struggle at the box office, while there's enormous money to be made in owning an IP franchise, whether it's James Bond or Superman or Harry Potter. Some of the longest-lasting and most prized IP in the industry, however, has no dollar value at all, since it's all in the public domain. Esther Zuckerman has a great essay this week about Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the latest cinematic iteration of which, directed by Emerald Fennell, was released on Friday, playing on 18,000 cinema screens around the world. It's expected to gross more than $70 million globally in its opening weekend alone, none of which will go to the Brontë estate. There's a very long line of Brontë and Jane Austen adaptations, which are interesting to look at, as Esther does, through the lens of reboot culture. "Whereas superhero stories are largely aimed at men," she notes, "these appeal to a distinctly female fan base." And there's no end to them in sight: A new Sense and Sensibility is coming out in September, and Netflix is working on a TV-series version of Pride and Prejudice, a follow-up of sorts to the Persuasion series it released in 2022. These adaptations don't need to be particularly faithful. The title of Fennell's movie is "Wuthering Heights" — quotation marks included — denoting that the film is in many ways fan fiction, complete with frequent and enthusiastic copulation between Cathy and Heathcliff. It's the kind of remix that has been a core driver of contemporary culture for decades and would be a much bigger driver were it not for the chilling effect of US copyright laws and the armies of zealous lawyers eager to weaponize them. When branded Labubus get remixed into beloved Lafufus, or even a concrete Labubrut, everybody wins. Illustration by Marine Buffard Which brings me to the essay I published on Thursday, under the headline "In Defense of Fakes." My thesis is that copies, fakes, dupes, replicas, bootlegs, pastiches, forgeries and facsimiles have been the engines of culture since long before the age of mechanical reproduction, and that the Asian attitude toward such artifacts, as exemplified by the Chinese concept of shanzhai, is probably more enlightened than our own. Copies ratify greatness. Walk down Manhattan's Canal Street, and you'll find countless fake bags and watches bearing the marks of luxury — Chanel, Goyard, Audemars Piguet, Rolex. Dupes can elevate these brands into the pantheon of desirability: Research by Italian professors of business and marketing has shown luxury knockoffs can increase consumers' willingness to pay for well-known original brands. Jane Birkin, whose very genuine Hermès Birkin bag sold for $10 million last year, said in 2011 that "if people want to go for the real thing, fine. If they go for copies, that's fine too. I really don't think it matters." All of which is to say that Fennell isn't trying to compete with Brontë, as the New York Times' Manohla Dargis avers. It's closer to the truth to say she's trying to reboot Brontë, which is precisely the activity that keeps this strangest of Victorian authors so immortal to this day. By the numbers The only white Ferrari 250 GTO ever made. Source: David Lee $38.5 million: The amount paid for a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO at a Florida auction last month. The value of all classic cars sold at three major auction events in January jumped 80% from a year earlier, even as the number of listings remained roughly static, Hannah Elliott reports. $15 million: The price paid last month for a copy of Action Comics No. 1, the 10-cent comic that introduced Superman in 1938. That's vastly more than the going rate for a first edition of Wuthering Heights from 1847. One sold for £87,500 ($115,000) in 2020. The auction record was set in 2007, when a different copy sold for £114,000, or about $235,000 at the time. £23: The cost of a vanilla flower tart from Cédric Grolet's in-house bakery at the Berkeley Hotel in London. That's more than $30. Then again, it comes in a free bag. And Sarah Rappaport writes that "carrying a shopping bag from one of Grolet's bakeries might now come with the same brand-name gravitas and social cachet as lugging around a giant shopping bag from Chanel." 30: The number of seconds it took for one of Dani DaOrtiz's magic shows to sell out at 69 Atlantic in Brooklyn, New York. For Bloomberg Businessweek, I discovered the reasons we've somehow found ourselves living in a golden age of close-up magic. Fire horse footwear They slip on so easily! Source: Sabah According to the traditional Chinese calendar, I was born in the Year of the Water Rat, which isn't a creature that lends itself to gifting nearly as easily as the fire horse, whose year we're now entering. If you feel like giving me a pair of $395 limited-edition Babas designed by Brooklyn-based artist Jia Sung, that might help assuage my chagrin. They can be found in our Lunar New Year Gift Guide, home to many other ideas, including a horse-themed resort stay at Nihi in Indonesia. Surf break A swimming pool on Rote Island, not near many things. Source: Nihi Hotels The newest Nihi resort in Indonesia, however, is Nihi Rote, one of our 25 places to go in 2026, and it's poised to rethink what hospitality can look like in a truly remote place. When it opens in April, the resort will include 21 thatched villas, a beach club with an infinity pool and fish-market-style barbecues for dinner. Locals might guide guests on "surfaris," where they boat out to waves that suit their ability. The same wind that powers those breaks makes Rote the perfect place to learn the up-and-­coming sport of wing foiling: You hover on a board just above the ocean's surface, pulled through the breeze by a handheld sail. Don't call it avocado toast Tuna and avocado tartar at the Spice Route. Photographer: Sankalp Phartiyal/Bloomberg Tuna and avocado tartar at the Spice Route in New Delhi comes with a ginger-laced dressing and, Sankalp Phartiyal reports, is "one of the city's better seafood openers." It's 2,650 rupees, about $30. Our Five Top Tables for India's capital also includes a place where you can get Cognac-flambéed lobster, should you find yourself in the mood for such an indulgence. New for subscribers: Free article gifting. Bloomberg.com subscribers can now gift as many as five articles a month to anyone they want. Just look for the "Gift this article" button on stories. (Not a subscriber? Unlock limited access and sign up here.) 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