nudawn:

suckafuck:

nudawn:

now im starting to get depressed.  i think ive beat this simulacra metaphor to death this week, but im wondering if anything is original.  to a certain extent everyone is influenced by something else.  i suppose the difference is the creation of something new from those influences as opposed to the bastardization and commercialization of something for the sake of nostalgia or “cool” factor.  fuck.  i just want to see something real.

I don’t think there’s enough space on the internet to contain the response I wish i could give… The best I can say is that we put too great a premium on originality. You could deconstruct anything to its referential elements - Yves Klein blue from Giotto blue, Basquiat from Lascaux, Ron Jeremy from Jackson Pollack - but we live in an age of re-appropriation, far beyond art for arts sake (if you haven’t, you really should read Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction). The era of Modern Art is one that transcends figurative reproductions and focuses on the philosophy and politic of the art and artist, so relating to what I said about Camerabag, the intent of the author (and the collective knowledge of the viewer) completely changes a piece, even if it is just to commercialize and bastardize a once-original idea. Duchamp said “fuck you!” to the art world by taking the most famous painting of all time, giving it a dirty sanchez, and calling it his own. I feel that his result is profoundly more “original” than DaVinci’s because it creates discourse about art, authorship, property, etc. which opened the door for Warhol (and Johns and Rosenquist and so many others). In a world where you can buy a fifty-cent postcard reproduction of a priceless work of art, the only logical step is to make priceless works of art out of the most pedestrian commodity. Haring, Richard Prince, Banksy, blah blah blah. 

It’s 2008 and I promise you there’s nothing that can be put on canvas or done with a camera that hasn’t be done before. But that’s good because it’s like, fine, lets be over “new shit” because it’s no longer as important to create something that’s unique as it is to say something new with what you create.

 Touché