Part II: Why Does Art Always Have to Be New?
“That has already been done.”
This sentence, too, has a remarkable destructive power in the visual arts. An artist presents a new work, someone recognises in it a distant relationship to something that existed thirty, eighty or three hundred years ago, and immediately there is the suspicion that the artist has somehow failed to reinvent art history properly. The particularly terminal version is: “But XY already did that in 1923.” At that point one can more or less pack up one’s things, apologise posthumously to XY and choose a profession in which repetition is considered less socially problematic.
But why do we expect visual art to be new at all? Why has originality become an almost self-evident criterion of quality? Nobody would criticise a contemporary writer for continuing to use sentences made up of subjects, verbs and objects. An architect may still install doors, even though the idea has not exactly been fresh for several thousand years. Musicians are allowed to use a violin without having to prove that the instrument was invented last Tuesday. In the visual arts, however, even a recognisable relationship to a historical visual language can sometimes be enough to create the suspicion that someone has nothing of their own to say.
Yet novelty was by no means always the almost moral obligation it became in modernism. Renaissance artists studied antiquity, copied celebrated works, adopted compositional schemes and learned in workshops by first reproducing the solutions of their masters. Of course, the concept of inventio already existed: invention, individual ingenuity, the ability to create. But the idea that an artist should detach themselves as completely as possible from everything that came before would probably have seemed rather strange to a fifteenth-century painter. If Botticelli discovered that somebody had already painted a Madonna before him, he did not immediately abandon his career. A connection to tradition was not an embarrassing flaw to be concealed as effectively as possible, but a natural basis of artistic work.
In the first part of this series, the question was whether art actually becomes “better”. Vasari believed in development and perfection, Hegel saw art as reflecting changes in humanity’s relationship to the world, Wölfflin saw changes in ways of seeing, and Gombrich described an ongoing process of inherited schemata and correction. Gombrich in particular already makes the demand for absolute novelty look suspicious. If artists fundamentally work with existing visual solutions, art can hardly arise by having every individual artist erase the cultural hard drive, reformat it and begin again from a state of complete innocence. Nevertheless, this ideal became increasingly powerful over the course of modernism. The artist was no longer expected merely to be good. The artist was expected to be original, preferably also radical, innovative, revolutionary, avant-garde and, in the best case, at least five minutes ahead of everyone else. The interesting question is therefore not simply why artists make new things. That would be trivial. The more interesting question is why, at some point, we began to regard novelty itself as a value.
Kant: Originality Enters the Stage
An important step leads to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In his Critique of Judgment of 1790, he deals, among other things, with the concept of artistic genius. For Kant, genius is not simply someone who is particularly good at following rules. It is a talent through which, in a sense, new rules are given to art itself. For precisely this reason, originality is essential to genius. Someone who executes existing rules brilliantly may be extremely skilful, but that alone does not automatically produce great art.
At the same time, Kant recognises a problem that has survived perfectly well into the present: nonsense can be completely original too. Something does not become significant simply because nobody has done it before. Kant therefore adds that the work of genius must also be exemplary. It should not merely be different; it should in some sense be capable of becoming an example.
This distinction is occasionally lost in contemporary discussions. I could produce a photographic series tomorrow by throwing my camera into a pot of goulash during every exposure. With a little luck, nobody would ever have done it before. My place in art history would nevertheless not be automatically secured. Yet Kant gives philosophical force to an idea that becomes increasingly important for modern art: the significant artist is not merely someone who masters existing rules exceptionally well. The artist creates something for which the existing rules are no longer entirely sufficient. The master increasingly becomes the genius, and the genius understandably has little desire to become famous chiefly for copying the neighbour particularly neatly.
Baudelaire: Art Should See Its Own Present
In the nineteenth century, Europe changes at a speed that had previously been difficult to imagine. Industrialisation, railways, the modern metropolis, new media, department stores, mass production and social upheaval transform everyday life. It is hardly surprising that artists increasingly develop the feeling that a new world may also require new forms. This is where Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) becomes important. In his essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne — The Painter of Modern Life — he describes modernity as that which is fleeting, transitory and contingent, existing alongside the enduring and timeless aspects of art. Artists should therefore not live exclusively in antiquity, the Bible and history painting. Clothing, street life, the modern city, social roles and the passing appearances of one’s own time are also worthy subjects of art.
Novelty therefore acquires a different meaning. At first, the point is not to look as strange as possible or to find a form that nobody has ever used before. Art should perceive its own time. That is a perfectly understandable demand. If the world changes, it would be odd for art to behave as though nothing had happened. It becomes more difficult only when the reasonable demand to take the present seriously gradually turns into the idea that one must therefore leave the past behind as thoroughly as possible. For that, the early twentieth century provides a number of remarkably determined people.
The Avant-Garde: The Old Must Go. Preferably Thoroughly.
The term avant-garde originally comes from the military and refers to the vanguard, the unit that advances ahead of the main force. It is a rather suitable metaphor for art. The avant-garde does not understand itself merely as contemporary, but as being ahead. It wants to be where everybody else will arrive later. In the early twentieth century, Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, Suprematism and other movements emerge that do not merely wish to create a new style. Many of them question fundamentally what art should be, what function it has and how it relates to society.
Italian Futurism does this with particular enthusiasm. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti publishes his Futurist Manifesto and celebrates speed, machines, the metropolis, youth and a radical break with the past. Museums no longer appear to the Futurists merely as treasure houses, but almost as cemeteries of a paralysing culture. The fact that Marinetti and parts of the Futurist movement later developed close and politically deeply problematic relationships with Fascism is, of course, part of this history and should not disappear behind the aesthetic excitement about engines and speed. For our question, however, one point is particularly important: the new now acquires value precisely because it opposes the old. Tradition is no longer merely developed further. It can be attacked, ridiculed or declared finished.
There is, however, a certain historical irony in this. Every avant-garde that becomes successful enough eventually ends up precisely where it supposedly did not want to go: in the museum. One begins by wanting to blow up the institutions and ends, a few decades later, carefully climate-controlled, catalogued and protected by an alarm system. The German literary and cultural theorist Peter Bürger (1936–2017) examined this process in his 1974 Theory of the Avant-Garde. Bürger, influenced by Marxist thought and Critical Theory, argued that the historical avant-gardes did not merely seek to produce new styles. They attacked the institution of art itself and attempted to overcome the separation between art and social life. This changes the meaning of novelty once again: not only a form or a material can be new. The function that art claims for itself can be new as well.
And it is precisely here that the search for a new visual language eventually turns into the much more radical question of whether art has to look like art at all. Duchamp is already waiting nearby. But we will come to him in Part III.
Greenberg: Every Medium Should Kindly Become Itself
A different and enormously influential answer to the development of modern art was formulated by Clement Greenberg (1909–1994). The American art critic became one of the most important representatives of modernist formalism and played a major role in the theoretical recognition of Abstract Expressionism. His idea is initially seductively logical: every art form should concentrate on those properties that are particularly its own. Painting should therefore not try to be literature, theatre or sculpture. One essential characteristic of painting is its two-dimensionality: it is a painted surface.
For centuries, European painting had invested enormous energy in making us forget precisely that surface. Perspective, modelling, light and shadow created the impression that we were looking through a window into a three-dimensional space. Greenberg, by contrast, sees modernism as increasingly self-critical. Painting discovers its own flatness, its colour, its materiality and the specific conditions of its medium. From Manet through various stages of modernism, this history leads rather convincingly towards abstraction — perhaps a little too convincingly.
Here we encounter an old acquaintance from Part I: teleological art history. In Vasari, development culminated in Michelangelo. With Greenberg, one sometimes gets the impression that all of painting had secretly known for centuries that it eventually wanted to arrive at modern abstraction; nobody had simply given it the address yet.
The problem is not that Greenberg’s analysis is uninteresting. His question about the specific possibilities of a medium is extremely productive. It becomes problematic when a possible development turns into the necessary development. What happens, then, to an artist who returns to figuration after abstraction? Is that artist backward? Has the train already left? Must art history always move in only one direction? And what happens to a photographer in 2026 who deliberately investigates visual languages whose roots lie a hundred years in the past? Did he simply fail to receive the news about modernism?
I Deliberately Concern Myself with Things That Have Already Existed
For my own photographic work, this question is anything but abstract. I deliberately engage with art history, with photographers of Art Deco, with František Drtikol, with expressive dance, historical forms of staging and old scripts. This is not because I accidentally missed a hundred years of photography. On the contrary, knowing that history is part of the work. When I shape a body with a hard geometric shadow, I am interested in what Drtikol did with similar means. When I draw on forms from Art Deco or expressive dance, I want to know where they come from, how they were used and what they meant in their original context. Not because I want to repeat them as faithfully as possible, but because I want to be able to decide consciously what I adopt, what I change and where my own work begins. Art history is therefore not a warehouse of old images from which one may help oneself as discreetly as possible. It is a body of experiences, forms and solutions to which I relate through my own work.
And I even choose subjects for which the demand for an entirely new topic would be fairly hopeless. Judith and Holofernes, for example. One can reasonably describe this subject as thoroughly worked over by art history. For centuries Judith has been painted, drawn, engraved and repeatedly reinterpreted. Caravaggio took it up, Artemisia Gentileschi created her famous versions, and neither of them was remotely the first. After several centuries of decapitation, one can almost understand if Holofernes might finally ask to be allowed to keep his head.
And yet it is precisely this story that interests me. Not because I believe I have discovered Judith. After this history, that would be an impressive achievement in art-historical ignorance. What interests me is what I can do with this story today. In my interpretation, the focus is not only on the act itself, but on the inner path leading towards it: perception, awareness, decision, transition and action. Body, pose and shadow become carriers of this process. The subject is old; the questions I ask of it do not therefore have to be old as well. Perhaps a subject is not really “worn out” at all. Perhaps only certain answers to it are.
If the previous use of a subject ruled out every further artistic engagement with it, art history would probably have ended rather early. Love, death, violence, power, desire, religion, the human body, landscape and self-image are not exactly motifs that were discovered yesterday. One could regard every Madonna after the first Madonna as repetition, discontinue large parts of European art after the first Crucifixion and declare the self-portrait sufficiently dealt with by the time of Dürer. Obviously, we do not do that, because a subject and an artistic statement about that subject are not the same thing.
A Homage to Gum Printing — Without Gum Printing
My next planned series takes this attitude one step further. It will be a homage to the aesthetic of gum printing and Pictorialism. Gum printing is a historic photographic printing process that played an important role particularly around the turn of the twentieth century. Its manual working methods, soft transitions, possibilities for intervention and distinctive surface effects made it particularly suitable for photographers who wanted to distance their images deliberately from a purely mechanical reproduction of reality.
Only I will not actually make gum prints. I will photograph digitally and use the possibilities of contemporary image processing, particularly Photoshop, to develop an aesthetic that refers to these historical processes. A purist could object: “Then it simply is not a gum print.” And the purist would be entirely correct. It is not a gum print, and I do not claim that it is. But that is precisely where the interesting question begins for me: what happens when the visual language of a historical process is separated from that process and recreated with the means of another time? What arose a hundred years ago partly from material, chemistry, coating, manual intervention and process becomes today a conscious aesthetic decision. I am not reproducing the historical process; I am quoting its visual language.
At that point, the concept of originality becomes remarkably uncomfortable. What would be more original: if I produced a historical gum print as accurately as possible according to procedures from 1910, or if I analysed its aesthetic, broke it down into its visual qualities and reconstructed them using digital means? The first option would undoubtedly be more historically authentic. But that does not automatically make it more artistically independent. Authenticity of process and independence of artistic statement are two different things. The same applies to my engagement with Art Deco or Drtikol. I am not trying to reconstruct a photograph from 1928 so perfectly that somebody later files it in the wrong archive. I use historical forms from a contemporary perspective. The light may recall Drtikol, a body posture may evoke expressive dance, a script may belong to a much earlier period. But the image is made today, with a present-day body, under contemporary cultural conditions, with contemporary technology and for a viewer who carries an additional hundred years of visual history with them. A historical quotation changes its meaning simply because today it can be recognised as a historical quotation.
Copy, Quotation and Transformation
Part of the problem may be that we too quickly confuse different forms of looking backwards. A copy attempts to reproduce an existing work as closely as possible. A quotation deliberately refers to something already present. A transformation takes an existing form, subject or language and changes its function in a new context. Art history consists to a considerable extent of precisely such processes. Artists have always looked at other artists. They adopted motifs, compositions, gestures and stories, contradicted their predecessors, tried to surpass them, parodied them or developed something of their own from an existing solution. The Renaissance would be almost inconceivable without its engagement with antiquity. We usually call that tradition. Today, when in a bad mood, we occasionally call it lack of originality.
For my own work, I would therefore never want to claim that I work without predecessors. Quite the opposite. I want to know which artists, visual languages and traditions I am referring to, so that the reference does not remain accidental. Someone who knows their influences can make more conscious decisions about whether to follow them, contradict them or place them in a different context. That does not mean, of course, that every historical reference automatically becomes interesting. Copying Drtikol does not by itself produce significant contemporary photography. Writing a Bastarda script on a body does not in itself create a good artwork. And digitally softening a photograph does not yet amount to a serious engagement with Pictorialism. An appeal to history can be just as empty as an appeal to innovation. The decisive question remains what actually happens to the inherited form.
Rosalind Krauss: Perhaps Originality Itself Is a Myth
At this point *Rosalind Krauss (1941) becomes particularly interesting. The American art historian and critic initially worked in an environment strongly influenced by Greenberg and later became an important voice in postmodern and post-structuralist art theory. Her 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths already contains the provocation in its title: the originality of the avant-garde may itself be a modernist myth.
Krauss examines how strongly modern art, despite its claim to radical originality, works with repetition, structures and already existing forms. She is particularly well known for her discussion of the grid. The grid became one of modernism’s symbols of autonomy, abstraction and the break with traditional representation. Unfortunately, a grid happens to consist of repetition. There is something almost maliciously beautiful about that: a culture that declares originality one of its highest artistic values celebrates a form whose basic principle is repetition.
Krauss does not simply claim that originality does not exist. More interesting is her criticism of the idea of the completely autonomous artist who, detached from history, language, conventions and society, produces something entirely unprecedented from the depths of the self. Artists work within cultural systems. They have seen images, read books, visited exhibitions, watched films, encountered advertising, listened to music and absorbed an almost unmanageable quantity of visual impressions since childhood. The cultural virginity of an artist would therefore be difficult to demonstrate. In this respect Krauss and Gombrich, despite coming from very different theoretical backgrounds, meet at an interesting point: nobody begins at zero.
What Does “New” Actually Mean, Then?
Perhaps we need to define the term more precisely. A work can be formally new because it uses an unfamiliar form or technique. It can be conceptually or thematically new because it asks a question that has previously received little attention. It can be contextually new because it places familiar forms in a different context. It can be methodologically new because its production process is unusual. And it can alter an old tradition in such a way that a new meaning emerges. These forms of novelty are by no means the same thing.
When someone says, “That has already been done,” the immediate response should therefore really be: What exactly has already been done? The motif? The technique? The pose? The material? The composition? The idea? The historical reference? The combination? Or the statement? The naked human body is probably no longer an entirely new motif. Remarkably, art history has nevertheless not yet decided to prohibit any further representations of it. Judith is not new either. The question is what becomes of Judith. Gum printing is not new. The question is what becomes of its aesthetic when it is consciously reread through the digital means of the twenty-first century.
Perhaps independence is therefore a more useful term than absolute originality. An independent work does not have to pretend it was born without ancestors. But it should make clear why it exists today, by this artist, with these means and in this form. For my own work, that is certainly the more reasonable ambition. I do not need to pretend that I have reinvented Drtikol; Drtikol is one of the historical visual languages from which I develop my own work. I do not need to rediscover Judith; I can ask different questions of an old story. And I do not need to produce a historical gum print in order to engage seriously with its visual aesthetic. Perhaps originality does not mean working without predecessors at all. Perhaps it means doing something of one’s own with one’s predecessors.
Why Do We Still Want the New?
Because modernism has left us an important idea: art should not merely confirm what already exists. It can change perception, question conventions, open up new possibilities and respond to its own present. I would certainly not want to abandon that demand. It becomes problematic only when novelty as a possibility turns into a compulsion to be new, and artists stop asking, “What do I want to say, and what form does this idea require?” and begin asking instead, “What has absolutely nobody ever done before?” Those are not the same question. One can create something completely new that is completely irrelevant. And one can take up a story that is centuries old and say something about the present that has never been said in precisely that way before. Kant may already have provided the most sensible qualification: originality alone is not enough.
Perhaps, then, we should stop using “That has already been done” as a verdict and start using it as the beginning of an investigation. What does this work do with what already existed? Does it merely repeat it, quote it, transform it, contradict it, shift its context or ask an old subject a new question? Of course, it may still turn out that an artist has merely discovered something everybody else has known for eighty years. That possibility exists too. Art theory remains no organised obligation to be forgiving. But at least the discussion would then be more interesting than an art-historical patent application.
And that brings us directly to the next problem. During the twentieth century, something happens that finally destabilises the idea of one necessary line of development. An ordinary object can suddenly become art. Two outwardly identical things can have entirely different status — one art, the other not. Abstraction, figuration, Conceptual Art, Pop Art and many other forms can exist simultaneously without any one of them necessarily representing the next evolutionary stage. Eventually Arthur Danto therefore asks a rather outrageous question: What if it is not art that ends, but the idea that its history must be going somewhere?
That will be Part III.
Literature and Further Reading
Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgment, 1790. Particularly relevant are the sections on genius, originality and exemplary artistic production.
Charles Baudelaire: Le Peintre de la vie moderne — The Painter of Modern Life, 1863. A central text for the modern understanding of one’s own present as a subject of art.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Manifesto del Futurismo — The Futurist Manifesto, 1909. A historically important and politically problematic key text for the avant-garde break with tradition and the past.
Peter Bürger: Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1974. Bürger examines the historical avant-gardes particularly in relation to their attack on the institution of art and the separation between art and social life.
Clement Greenberg: Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 1939, and Modernist Painting, 1960s. Central texts of American modernist formalism and of the ideas of medium specificity and artistic self-criticism.
Rosalind E. Krauss: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 1985. A fundamental critique of modernist notions of originality, autonomy and the avant-garde.