is it possible to create anything original anymore?
Has anything original been made since the 1950s when the flood gates were opened? LSD, the Moon Landing, electronic music, and now it's Silk Road, glitch art, Tumblr, and Bandcamp.
How can one be original in a world where everyone is regarded as unique and special?
Is art dead, /his/?
>>406494
Idk
What artist is that though? I really like glitch art and that's a really good piece.
>>406494
if human artifice is itself the first artistic creation, and technology has blown open our dependence upon anything ~but~ our artificial creations, by what reference point are we ever to judge the work of art or communicate with others?
Is language itself becoming obsolete and meaningless?
>>406507
idk I just google glitch art but let's be serious i'm having an artistic crisis here!
if everyone's art is equally unique and special than nothing new can be further created. free jazz was the end of originality in music, and the internet is the end of communication in humans.
what do we do!?
>>406494
Originality is a recent meme. Influence and direct copying have always been the bulk of art.
>>406494
Originality is a meme criterion for something being good. Aside from that,
>How can one be original in a world where everyone is regarded as unique
I don't believe I understand what you mean. If everything is regarded as unique, isn't everything original?
>>406538
but some stand out, right?
For instance, would you deny that there's something significant about Picasso's first cubist works? They represent a dialectical movement of history.
The bulk is unoriginal, but at least we were heading ~somewhere~, right? Even if ~there~ was WWII.
>>406545
Sure, but when you're talking about Picasso's time you're already focusing on the height of the 'originality' meme. It was not always thus, it will not always be thus. Picasso did something significant by doing something original. Zurbaran did something significant by bringing Caravaggio's style to Spain. There is nothing necessarily more significant about making an original contribution to art than devoting yourself to an existing tradition and carrying it forward.
>>406540
words only have meaning in contrast to other words. If unoriginality does not exist, then originality cannot exist, just as there can be no such thing as white without black, good without evil, etc.
It is by the bad that we define and limit the scope of the good. Now, everyone is freed from the grips of sociocultural normality and encouraged to be special. So in order to be normal, you now have to be special.
So the tables have turned. History is over. We've somehow managed to overstep our own shadow. The sun seems to be on the other horizon, and we're now going backward, deeper into animality and organic meaninglessness.
>>406564
>words only have meaning in contrast to other words
Stop it with this differential field nonsense.
Our consciousness will change and then the spirit of the future will create different art
>>406563
Ah, I see what you mean, however, carrying on an existing tradition is also becoming impossible as a result of technology and the means of mechanical reproduction. If it is unoriginal, a machine can make it, and that's exactly what is destroy the capacity for spontaneous thought and pictorial representation.
>>406574
read the book of job, dude. Hegel was right in his dialectic of opposite but wrong teleologically.
~we~ are the only divine power that can set things straight and our capacity for speech and creativity is dissolving into thin air as mechanical reproducibility circles back on itself.
>>406575
The idea that fine art can be something beautiful and elegant and doesn't need to be original was blown to pieces in the 20th century. Blame Duchamp for this. Art is now obsessed with being original, edgy, daring, cynical, deconstructivist, post-modern. Whether you like our dislike this is up to you.
>>406575
>Ah, I see what you mean, however, carrying on an existing tradition is also becoming impossible as a result of technology and the means of mechanical reproduction. If it is unoriginal, a machine can make it, and that's exactly what is destroy the capacity for spontaneous thought and pictorial representation.
Machinery hasn't stopped anyone from doing anything in fine art, only illustration. But there are still realist painters, and hyperrealists too, which were not possible before the camera. And we have mighty new industries of machine art, too. Film and television and games are doing fine.
>>406586
oh so you post a picture of Walter now, too, eh? He killed himself because of just this realization!
God is us and we have finally abandoned ourselves.
Anyone in this thread who does not commit suicide benjamin-style is a pleb.
>>406494
>is it possible to create anything original anymore?
Nothing is "original", every idea is a synthesis of old ideas.
That said, there's no such thing as an "avant-garde" any more; the Hype Cycle re-purposes any new/subversive movements into tools which individuals use to gain cultural capital.
>>406592
>>406596
i'm unconcerned with beauty. i'm more concerned with human spontaneity. history is a dialectical process of unpredictable and spontaneous events. Technology makes that kind of spontaneity completely impossible.
New conceptions of beauty will emerge, but they will be reproducible and predictable. The world is become a more predictable place and is becoming increasingly deterministic.
It will never fully become so, but fewer people will spend time praying every day until we all are free to jack off forever, never having to till the soil or say a word to one another.
>>406597
Walter Benjamin's theory (while I'm not exactly well-versed enough in this field to argue against it directly) does not reflect current reality though. The aura is not dead. The Cult of Art lives on strong through appropriation of select photography into the artworld.
>>406592
>Art is now obsessed with being original, edgy, daring, cynical, deconstructivist, post-modern.
Really only some of it, but not coincidentally the loudest portion. Rather than the whole field taking a turn in any direction, it has split and individuals have gone off in every direction. Variety increases. Only memers let themselves get memed into thinking it's all one meme.
>>406607
>Nothing is "original", every idea is a synthesis of old ideas
Hegel proves this wrong in his Science of Logic. For this to be the case we would have to exits in some sort of stasis. You could construct a logic in the opposite direction but it would be a serious undertaking. Wittgenstein basically gave up at the end of his life and decided to accept the spiral as it slowed. We've peaked since then.
>>406611
>Technology makes that kind of spontaneity completely impossible.
This is a decision you are making for yourself. People manifestly do use technology to make new art all the time.
>>406615
it's dying dude, it'll inevitably be gone.......
>>406626
you're right, and so are you.
we all are by being on 4chan at this very moment. the apex of where the world is heading communication-wise.
>>406494
bout' to take these cyanide tablets and browse my collection of hegel and benjamin photos as it dissolves and eats away my insides.
pray with me guise.
>parise be thy lord and good riddance to evil
>>406494
>And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
>>406494
>im a special snowflake living in a unique time in history
right.
>>406628
I don't believe so. The institution of art has already paved the way for its infinite status through appropriation and redefining. Just look to the institutionalists like Danto.
>>406494
>There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
>Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
>Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
>>406663
phorgot photo of hannah
>>406611
>The world is become a more predictable place and is becoming increasingly deterministic.
This is incorrect. Rather, the world was always this "deterministic," the average person merely has more information at their disposal with which to predict things. And, arguably, the amount of data an individual has access to makes accurate predictions even harder, as now they have to account for the massive noise-to-signal ratio.
Really, you're just getting upset over getting to see behind the curtain a bit. Knowing the trick behind an illusion doesn't make it any less impressive.
>>406657
Art began with an "era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes... In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story."
idk much about Danto but he seems to be reiterating what I'm saying. He's looking at history and at Hegel's thought.
>there is are being made, it's just not good art
>>406680
you are misinterpreting the dilemma and answering your own dilemma. read hegel and benjamin then come back.
>>406694
Yes, but, unless im misinterpreting, you're claiming that this is causing the death while im claiming that this is preserving the future. All things have been allocated a space in art, so long as the artworld deems them art.
It's actually really easy to be original.
There are millions of sentences nobody would have ever said.
"I once fucked a polka dot covered Peregrine Falcon while giving a blowjob to a a Russian Deep Sea Diver."
Nobody has ever said that before you can count on it.
That is art right there.
>>406704
i'm not talking about art in the broad sense, I'm talking about, specifically, artistic action, which is the only reason for being we really have, if you wanna get nitty gritty.
artistic action is unpredictable. to get where i'm coming from you must have a belief in free will. I believe in a very small margin of free will. It can be identified through careful psychoanalytic thinking. We are 99% predetermined but there's always some infinitely small thing that's unpredictable.
For instance, we can map the whole brain, but we won't be able to create A.I. That's the theory at least.
I'm taking Hegel's word for it there even though his logic is a bit spotty, it's better than anything anyone else ever did on the subject that matters most: life.
>>406706
Two definitions of originality:
1. something that was from the beginning, the big bang
2. something that's brand new entirely
My point is that #1 and #2 used to be the same, and there is a growing distance between them.
>>406724
in other words: humans are literally shedding their divine skin and returning to dust because they ~believe~ they are nothing but dust.
>>406720
>which is the only reason for being we really have
But.. muh hedonism... muh enjoyment... muh God....
>>406494
>is it possible to create anything original anymore?
Question is at least as old as Classical Greece. It's called anxiety of influence. Callimachus (worked in the Library of Alexander for Ptolemy II) was a big critic of it and encouraged writers to always try for originality.
>>406494
>>406796
Sorry. That is to say, yes, it is possible because we've been asking ourselves this question for 2500 years and keep inventing new, creative, original ideas and methods of expression.
For the most part we obviously reuse conventions that have become successful and popular, but new formats still come through. Image boards are a post-1950s invention that allow for expression and exploration of ideas in a manner that (was) entirely unique when they were invented, for instance.
In film you might consider Memento and Babel wholly original formats.
>>406494
the savior
vaporwave is the most original art movement of the century
>>407310
it's a vomit in the toiltbowl of elevator music and 80's house with 90's internet graphics and a few dashes of japanese text here and there
if anything it's the embodiment of the lazy "creativity" where any schmuck with a DAW can feel like a real music producer by slowing down diana ross 40% adding some reverb and call it a day.
basically, it sucks.
>>407310
it's the single most unoriginal thing, since parodies and jokes are as old as prostitution
btw i prostituted ur mom last nite
It was overrated this whole time.
>>406494
>is it possible to create anything original anymore?
Yes. New mathematics is being done all the time.
https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
>>407332
>thinking that inputted work matters at all when judging aesthetic value or social output
top kek lad. Go back and jerk off to some classical compositions or photorealistic paintings.
