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Artists that add their name to their respective artistic canons throughout history have always borrowed from the past and gained inclusion into the canon by paying the appropriate homage to that the current time demands, and by also adding some novel element that progresses the art forward.
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I added to this post:
case in point: Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh, as we know, is the A-number one king daddy in today's art market. His works fetch the highest prices. He's widely recognized as a visionary genius. And he is.
But, with Van Gogh, or with any artist, one can deconstruct the work with a critical eye and see the influences/. For Van Gogh, it was the work of Millet. And he copies Millet in his early work in his very crude way. He finally flowers later on after coming into contact with his contemporaries: Gauguin, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. which he also apes in his own way.
Moreover, his meager collection of Japanese wood-block prints were an instrumental inspiration to his art. Van Gogh's work helped to bring over to the Western world an Eastern conception of negative space and pictorial composition.
I've just enumerated many ways in which Van Gogh isn't original, yet he's regarded as a visionary genius.
And I do think he is a visionary genius, but I'm just trying to make a point here.
I surely do hope that I have made it abundantly clear what "postmodernism" is truly about. As the speed of information and technology has progressed, we have simply sucked the mystery (and hence the symbolic meaning) out of everything.
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