February 12, 2023
IF IT WERE ORIGINAL IT WOULDN'T BE ART...:
Is the concept of originality in art a bit, well, unoriginal? (Adam D'Arpino, 2/12/23, Psyche)
It can be dispiriting to discover that a work of art you were drawn to as a young person - perhaps something you loved so much that you absorbed it into your very identity - was essentially a retread of something that came before. Maybe it was learning that Led Zeppelin were cribbing from US blues artists, that all the best Simpsons episodes were homages to classic films, or that Romeo and Juliet were just another remix in a long line of star-crossed lovers. But, getting older, it might just be inevitable to conclude that, as Shakespeare himself wrote, 'there be nothing new, but that which is hath been before' - borrowing from the Old Testament, of course.
...just Ideology:
And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors
forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more
frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no
more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected,
just "the artist", in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, not even existence, for that
got lost in the subjunctive mode--and in the moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of
insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher until, with one last erg
of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperature...and came
out the other side as Art Theory!...Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled
by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the
Universal Souls.
forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more
frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no
more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected,
just "the artist", in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, not even existence, for that
got lost in the subjunctive mode--and in the moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of
insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher until, with one last erg
of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperature...and came
out the other side as Art Theory!...Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled
by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the
Universal Souls.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 12, 2023 8:09 AM