UMS Reaction Paper- Art Theft is Art

Art Theft is Art

Artistic appropriation is as old as art itself. Indeed, one may argue that they are one in the same—appropriation being inextricably woven into the genealogical fabric of artistic evolution. It is only with the rise and fall of high modernism and the subsequent emergence of postmodernism that the practices of pastiche and referential explicitness (now, artistic merits in their own right) have, with a looming malignance, threatened the established bourgeois pretentions of cultural elitism that are now manifest in the argument against appropriation. Almost nowhere is this lineage more apparent than through the phenomenon of intertextuality. Through a brief survey of intertexual practices, we can see how, in a culture wherein appropriation is part of the artistic process, it is ultimately a work’s form that determines its authenticity.
The development of art would not have been possible without artists’ appropriation of the work and ideas of their predecessors. Picasso’s celebrated Les Demoiselles D’Avignon derives its aesthetic from African decorative masks. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury borrows its title from a soliloquy in Macbeth. Appropriation can range from the incorporation of specific works to entire cultures. Indeed, the orientalist tendency in Western classical music is responsible for compositions ranging from Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 to Ravel’s Bolero. Even Western Philosophy, must be understood in terms of elaborations on or reactions against historical strand thought. Art is indeed appropriation, incorporation and consequent synthesis of existing ideas and modes of expression.
When modernism came into cultural prominence, it represented a myriad interests of the emerging avant-garde, among which included the refusal of aesthetic norms handed down from the bourgeoisie. Ironically, modernism itself embodied an elitist spirit insofar that its defining characteristic as a high-art movement rested upon a vehement rejection of mass culture (Lethem, 2007). As modernism gave way to postmodernism, many of the former’s defining aesthetic practices remained the same (Storey, 1998, pp.345). However, as the societal conditions that once fostered modernism’s elitist privilege changed (largely due to the exponential rise of mass culture and consumerism and later, the increasing coexistence and mutual incorporation between mass culture and contemporary art), proponents of the modernist cultural elite found themselves with increasingly less evidence to validate their argument of a high/low cultural divide—which is
one of the main premises underlying the argument against artistic appropriation. This phenomenon can be seen through the evolution of collage and pastiche from modernism to postmodernism.
In modernism we have the analytical cubist works of Picasso and Braques; in the photomontage and cut and paste poems of the Dadaists and the readymade sculptures of the Surrealists; and literary works such as T.S. Eliot’s monumental The Wasteland, whichis referential to the point that it necessitates an accompanying index; all of which employ a semiotic play of artistic signs and signifiers through the disruption of traditional contextualization. By the same token, postmodernism ushered in a number of art forms, myriad in their constitution—many to the point of being virtually indefinable. Some more concrete examples are pop art, Hip-hop, the music video and video montage, and of course, literary works like Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill. The difference to acknowledge is that, whereas prior to postmodernity, the appropriative artist was veiled behind a façade of pedantic elitism in an effort to shock and destroy convention, now it seems the
artist’s object is to blatantly acknowledge and even celebrate his influences—ironically, achieving the same ends. This is problematic for those artists who still opt to claim the increasingly-antiquated credits to total originality.
The poststructuralist theory of intertextuality states that no single text exists as an isolated work or idea but rather that its structure is determined by an innumerable and synchronic textual structures preceding it. (Kristeva, 1980). The conclusion is that the idea of a completely original authorship is a false construction. Taking this into account we can make observations of artistic creation based the premise that a work is validated not so much through the ideas it expresses, but rather the form through which its expresses them. For example, Homer’s Odyssey surfaces in James Joyce’s Ulysses; a millennia’s worth of artists have reprised the Crucifixion; rock music deviates from rock and roll which took from the blues and its limited yet invertible archetypal forms (Lethem, 2007): these and all the aforementioned express a commonality of ideas that stretch across multiple cultural landscapes but it is the way the
individual artists expresses them—the form trough which they are expressed—that gives them uniqueness and authenticity.
Through Hegemann’s declaration: “There is no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” we can trace John Donne’s quote, “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated”(Donne, 1987). Ultimately, as art evolves, the clichés that state nothing is new prove to be increasingly true. Nevertheless, (to pay service to yet one last cliché) it is not so much what you say but how you say it.

Bibliography


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