There was a recent show on NPR Radio last week discussing what original art is. Both the host and the person doing the show took the position of saying that in fact, all art is essentially ‘derivitive’. Their contention was that nothing created is truly original. I assume they mean that nothing is therefore ‘authentic’.
This is an important consideration especially when you are in the market for Buying Original Art. Listening to the program I was in a large, natural setting with beautiful trees and I began to think about this. Because a tree comes from a seed does that mean it is not an original and authentic tree? Well, of course not, right? It is derivitive of course but that does not take away from this particular tree being very uniquely original.
They cited numerous examples of works of theatre, music, dance and paintings drawing from some previous effort and then producing something out of that -a sort of hybrid, but not an original. The examples were certainly plausible but somehow not convincing. I thought of small children painting. I think we could all say whatever it is they are producing seems very original. Then I thought of something quite basic to our existence, our breathing. We do nothing to create it but yet we breathe. The breath itself, each one is completely original. With a stick we might draw an oblong shape in the sand…is that shape original? Does it represent something uniquely our own? I pictured myself breathing and drawing lazy, loose freehand shapes.
Their contention was that even when we think we are drawing something quite unique, we are nevertheless responding to a vast, corporate reservoir of human experience. They said it is something like a corporate consciousness and we cannot escape from that large pool of influence. In spite of that argument I kept admiring the beautiful tree that provided me shade while I lunched. Perhaps it is that our lives are truly much more original and authentic that we might even acknowledge. If our very breath is original, why not the red slash across the canvas, the way my voice finds a new octave, the way I alter a recipe? I personally happen to believe, in the process of creating abstract art we often tap into something quite beyond our own limited consciousness, beyond our own confined set of experiences. I am certainly not alone in this assertion. It is a discovery. It is what draws us to create…the opening up of that mystery and that ‘other’ transcendent consciousness.