Quote:
|
Originally Posted by atari 2600
Artists that add their name to their respective artistic canons throughout history have always borrowed from the past and gained inclusion into the canon by paying the appropriate homage to the past that the current time demands and by also adding some novel element that progresses the art forward.
|
Exactly. Which is why the idea of postmodernism is not only lazy but ultimately historically incorrect.
I've already mentioned key modernist figures such as Joyce as demonstrating key postmodernist principles in their work, but we could go at least as far back as Shakespeare and Da Vinci for evidence of artistic 'plunder'.
Perhaps the only true avant-garde is that of the early soviet union, in its bid to construct a culture completely seperate from (and in opposition to) that of the Western canon. But even here, with someone like Eisenstein and his appropriation of traditions such as vaudeville, the circus, etc, things are far from straight forward.