[!@#$%!]

pinches guerequeques:

originality in art is quite a modern concept. back in the day the measure of excellence was imitation of the old masters. hence virgil wanted to be like homer, and dante wanted to be like virgil, even though he wrote in the language of the marketplace and he invented the terza rima and didn't write in hexameters... but anyway, the emphasis used to be in keeping up the tradition.

flukes aside, the real entry into the future comes with the german romantics, who were into the infinite and all that shit. let me just skip over all the philosophy (kant, hegel, fichte) and simply say that they were into "the new" because their goal was, simply put "the expansion of consciousness". and thus the emphasis on innovation was born.

thus originality has its value in the sense that it creates something that didn't exist before, something with which the mind can grapple and incorporate.

however-- originality is a value in itself, it doesn't require correlation with other ("good", "beautiful", "true", "useful") qualities, unless you're a fichtean whore-- or rimbaud.

see, bitches, rimbaud followed the cue from his german predecessors in this letter known as "of the visionary" (there were 2):

Originally Posted by little arthur, boy genius

The first study of a man who wants to be a poet is his self-knowledge, complete;he looks for his own soul, he inspects it, he tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it. That seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place ;so many egoists proclaim themselves authors;there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! - But the soul has to be made monstrous: after the fashion of the comprachicos*, if you like! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.

 

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.

 

The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and rational dissoluteness of all the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness;he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, to only keep their quintessence. Inexpressible torture where he needs all the faith, all the superhuman strength, where be becomes, above all others, the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, - and the supreme Savant! - For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone else! He reaches the unknown, and when, terrified, he ends up by losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die of his bound through the unheard-of and countless things: other horrible workers will come;they will begin from the horizons where the other has succumbed!

see, i would argue that after rimbaud art no longer searches for the beautiful, but for the unknown (the schlegels had already fucked plenty with the infinite, though), and so art becomes a vehicle for knowledge and mindexpansion where before it was for mere pleasurable enjoyment.

a million years later btw patti smith would scream "i haven't fucked much with the past but i've fucked plenty with the future". same deal. rimbaud enters rocknroll.

but anyway... where was i? i turned a corner and i got lost. oh yes. my point.

my point is that originality is highly important, but pretentious twats will often disqualify something that may be good, true, beautiful, or useful because it' not original-- like some sort of fashion whores.

there are things that don't need to be reinvented-- air, water, sunlight-- and are perfectly good in their own form. in this sense and this sense only originality is "overrated".

but originality in itself, when you remove the pretentious twats and the posers from the equation, is not worthless as some of you claim. not if we are to evolve and grow in our knowledge and understanding of the world, not if we are going to become seers.

anyway, that is that. please dont torture me with silly discussions.

any questions?