A thought. In my youth, I encountered a very simplified narrative of art: There is the "traditional," which is in conversation with the past and really only considered art inasmuch as it reaches back into the past, and there is the "modern," which is inherently bad and anti-nature/nominalist.
This is simply not true. Art has never been stagnant. Conservatives look at medieval art like it's pastiche and miss the major innovations in perspective, the political subtext of including patrons in the art, changing depictions of the Holy Family, etc. They think the Renaissance was just a rediscovery of the ancient world, when in fact it's an entirely novel perspective (and reinterpretation) of the ancients--one which is in fact pretty discontinuous with the original context!
The past is a key ingredient in what makes the art intelligible but it's not the only ingredient in making and interpreting art! If you always assume that novelty is automatically discontinuity or rupture, you are missing the conversation that is going on within the piece.
"pastiche" is exactly the right word - that's what happens when you reproduce an image outside the context that gives it meaning (that is, objectify or commodify it). Postmodernists know they're doing pastiche when they do it; "traditionalists" will do it unknowingly and then assume it can bear all the same meaning it did before, no interruption
A thought. In my youth, I encountered a very simplified narrative of art: There is the "traditional," which is in conversation with the past and really only considered art inasmuch as it reaches back into the past, and there is the "modern," which is inherently bad and anti-nature/nominalist.
This is simply not true. Art has never been stagnant. Conservatives look at medieval art like it's pastiche and miss the major innovations in perspective, the political subtext of including patrons in the art, changing depictions of the Holy Family, etc. They think the Renaissance was just a rediscovery of the ancient world, when in fact it's an entirely novel perspective (and reinterpretation) of the ancients--one which is in fact pretty discontinuous with the original context!
The past is a key ingredient in what makes the art intelligible but it's not the only ingredient in making and interpreting art! If you always assume that novelty is automatically discontinuity or rupture, you are missing the conversation that is going on within the piece.
"pastiche" is exactly the right word - that's what happens when you reproduce an image outside the context that gives it meaning (that is, objectify or commodify it). Postmodernists know they're doing pastiche when they do it; "traditionalists" will do it unknowingly and then assume it can bear all the same meaning it did before, no interruption