The myth of originality
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Abstract
The other day, I looked back to those special days when I was a kid. I would sit in front of a blank sheet of paper with a colored pencil, and freak out. I was a very neurotic kid. Nothing I could put on the paper seemed right. No beauty could come out of my mind and through my hands. There were a lot of neuroticisms I had to overcome in order to appreciate and engage with art, and a big one was a notion of “originality” in my head which always stopped me from actually making art. To kid me, art was about bringing something from nothing, and to take inspiration was to cheat. Art was the pure expression of coming up with an image in the mind and then transmuting it perfectly onto the page. As I grew up, I learned how a lot of my favorite artists worked, and my childlike notion of “originality” started to feel only like a one-sided illusion, held in the viewer but never in the artist themselves. Whenever I would read the history of a piece of art, I would look for the “originality” and it would never come.