Originality

LEFT: Chris Succo, Actress Showed Her Love, 2013. RIGHT: Robert Ryman, Unit, 1980. Via Observer

Recently, on my search for critical reviews on a couple of emerging artists that I have been following, I found an article entitled Are Painters Out of Idea?, criticizing much of today’s emerging contemporary artists (born in the 80’s) for being mere (or bad) copies of modern masters. The question on originality is not new; the concept itself has been widely addressed through the first two thirds of the 20th century by modernists like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol –just to name the most iconic ones– until the debate seemed completely exhausted towards the end of the 70’s in favor of postmodernists, who not only couldn’t care less about originality, but embraced the complete lack of it as a vanguard approach to it. The opposite would have been completely unnatural. After centuries of aesthetics’ progressive de-construction of the image, nature and man, which led to Post-minimalism and Conceptualism in the 70’s, can anything really new and original be made? In the realms of conceptualism of course you can, but whatever pop up is a mere idea, which ultimately is original because everyone images it like they want to. But in the end it is just an abstract idea, which has the same weight as opinions… and you know where they say you can stick those, don’t you? So, fine, Millennials aren’t original, but were any postmodernists original? The fact that their originality came from the embracement of appropriation of idea, concepts, images, etc. doesn’t make them original or do they? In any case, as an open debate, I invite those who see this post to read Are Painters Out of Idea? and tell me which artist post-1980 has been truly original. It seems to be that a lot of today’s young artists are being incriminated for not being original when their predecessors, today’s untouchables of the international aesthetics arena, aren’t any more original than they are. So, please, if we want to look forward, let’s forget about originality, that debate was over in the 80’s.