Apart from the obvious bits of new technology being used, have artists come up with anything radically new since Dada?
Artists seem to need the reassurance that their work is innovative, and that their ideas are unique and new.
Are claims of being original just vain and irrational?
I started to do a Google search each time I come up with an idea, right at the beginning of the process (in my case) of putting together ideas for a painting.
This has stopped a number of projects going ahead, since the web was already full of good and bad versions of exactly what I was going to do.
I like to be able to claim some originality in my ideas. Of course, being a painter, I’m hardly going to re-invent the wheel. There a billions of paintings by billions of artists about. The statistical likelihood is that someone, somewhere has been there and done it.
Let’s go to artists doing less established artforms. Performance? Been there since theatre and dance existed, firmly established in the art world since Cabaret Voltaire. Installation? People have been arranging their environment for pleasure since the beginning of time, and, again, the Dadaists brought it into the art world. Same with minimalism, cubism, abstract expressionism, film&video, sound art, whatever.
The only thing that has evolved is the means of delivery, i.e we have better ways of realising ideas, mainly in digitalisation of what used to be specialist, expensive and hard to do.
As far as I see right now, everything since Dada is post-modern.
