Week 2 - Forum

Wikipedia as my personal source of information on many things, defines originality as: The aspect of created or invented works as being new or novel, and thus can be distinguished from reproductions, clones, forgeries, or derivative works.
In our forum, however, we didn’t really discuss about the definition or any sort of expected meaning of originality. Mr Whittington sparked the presentation with the very true fact that if you copy from one individual, you have committed plagiarism; but if you copy from several people, that is a research!
Talking particularly about music, as many other elements of this art are (or could be) defined subjectively, this very concept of originality would be different for different people. We were told about Ali Akbar Khan’s story of reforming a traditional piece of music and being punished because of that. Likewise, there are numerous incidents in which several artists had faced difficulties and in cases physical reactions when they tried to utilise their former fellow artists’ artworks to come up with something new (or rather original).
In my opinion, starting from the modernist era there have been many cases that artists would purposely take others’ works, sometimes mix them together, or deform them, or even tease them and bring a “new” idea of that particular artwork without any fear of confrontation. Andy Warhol and his famous pop-art works are good examples of this.
Talking about this issue from a complete different aspect, originality could be started with just having an original idea. This definition does not talk about the materials which are going to be used during the application of the idea.
Mr Whittington told us about a quality named “Aura” by Walter Benjamin; a German critic and philosopher from the Frankfurt School. Aura basically deals with uniqueness of incidents, ideas or artworks. I searched for the very relation between music and the concept of aura but most of the information I could find about Benjamin was about his Marxist philosophical views.
French social theorist Jean Baudrillard defines a term of “Simulacrum” as a copy of a copy which has been so dissipated in its relation to the original that it can no longer be said to be a copy.
We also listened to some works of John Zorn, an avant-garde American musician who has a significant role in the history of experimental music.

Despite all the controversy of defining originality, my personal point is whether it is important or not. In the real life, especially nowadays, we come across many particularly musicians who basically just “cover” someone else’s artwork and even pay him/her to use their work and a tiny number of the audience think of the fact that at least the idea of that specific song is NOT original.
One part of gaining information is to know what to do, but I also think of the application of the knowledge. I have studied music before, precisely jazz. For all of my assignments I had to basically copy others’ rules and just change the order of chords or notes. I got marks for my tests, but I never consider that work as an original one. The chord progression of I, VI, II, V is used in thousands of songs throughout the world. What makes one original (or at least originally to majority of the audience) at the present time is in most of the cases not musical at all. I think as the time changes, and so do our perceptions and conception, the way we (the audience) think or rather pay attention to an artwork would necessarily change as well.
For me an original artwork means “An artwork which affects the audience in a new (and preferably unique) way, regardless of the origins of the material used in it.”



References:
. Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org)
. The official Ali Akbar Khan webpage (http://www.ammp.com)
. Mark Harden's art archive (http://www.artchive.com)
. The Walter Benjamin research syndicate (http://www.wbenjamin.org)
. Stanford University (http://www.stanford.edu)
. John Zorn's website (http://www.omnology.com)
. University of California Santa Cruz (http://www.ucsc.edu)
. Andy Warhol museum (http://www.warhol.org)
. La Central - Barcelona (http://www.lacentral.com)
. Philosophy and its heroes (http://www.filosofico.net)
. The University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu)
. Google images (http://images.google.com)