Originality and recontextualised ideas in contemporary culture

With the development of media technology and diversified way of contemporary communications, artists will sometimes imitate the basic originalities of the early art works by drawing on the experience of their art elements, styles, and form etc. They are not trying to plagiarize because they often use new methods such as photography, collage, computer technology and so on to make changes on the basis of the early work. These changes involve from the methods of creating the work—media, to the art form and the intention of it. They know that what is the essence of notion originality and combine their own creativity with the existing one. For example, compare the following two pictures,the first one is the advertisement of Ashanti Beer, the second is the old Japanese painting “The great Wave of Kanagawa”, by Hokusai. We can easily find that they are similar in a way.The advertisement’s inspiration comes from the old painting, but it has quite different intention and audience from that one. The old woodblock printing is a study of contrasts between thundering waves and the small but mighty Mt. Fuji. which is just for enjoyment and only has decorated value in old times. Now artist borrowed the same element—waves and even the same composition of picture combine with the new visual technology to make it an attractive advertisement which is showed to drinking lovers, it finally has the commercial value.

The selectively borrowing of ideas, forms and styles from other’s work, from historical culture or other aspects of man made visual or non visual culture brings modern people lots of benefits and better promote the society process. The inherent in the process of imitate and creating is the fact that the new work recontextualises whatever it borrows to create the new work. The recontextualised idea can be contemporary in some extent. For instance, the following first picture “Venus standing in her landscape” shows the beautiful gesture of Greek goddess of love, Venus.  Compared to it, the second picture also uses the image of Venus but create a different background and shade which seems to represent a mysterious meaning. The first picture is just a regular oil painting while the second is created in new media technology. Moreover, this is a kind of cultural borrowing that whether the art elements are modern or not, it can be contemporary by new ways of creating.

In summary, originality is the essence of creating, recontextualised ideas is the way of changing, modern artist use different ways of communication and make various changes of the art forms in order to endow them with new values such as commercial values, journalism values and so on. It’s a process which show the development of visual communication.

Reference:
1.Nagata, Seiji (1995). "Hokusai: Genius of the Japanese Ukiyo-e." Kodansha International, Tokyo.
2.Hillier, Jack (1980). Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration. Sotheby Publications, London. 
3.Snyder, James; Northern Renaissance Art, 1985, Harry N. Abrams