best exemplars of its solution. A wish for a perfect union of spontaneity and
discipline, of sensuousness and thought, and of impulse and craft seems to
inhabit many of our deepest relationships (or our aspirations within them), and
the partial fulfillment of this wish seems to be something of what we admire in
dance and in sports. Original art seems to express and nurture this wish, in
offering further exemplary, partial fulfillments of it. Adorno remarks that
“modern art constantly works the Münchhausean trick of carrying out the
identification of the nonidentical,”^45 that is, of achieving spontaneous, new,
and yet intelligible and intelligibly crafted artistic work. (According to the tale,
Baron Munchausen is supposed to have pulled both himself and his horse out of
a quagmire by his own hair.) Original artistic making serves as a central means
of humanity pulling itself upward into more fully human, more meaningful
life.
Criticisms of the pursuit of originality: postmodernism
and feminism
Despite the attractiveness of this picture of the nature and importance of
artistic originality, the idea that art can or should be original has had a
relatively bad press in the past forty or so years in advanced criticism in
the arts and humanities. Already in 1975 Tom Wolfe was complaining that
the pursuit of individual artistic heroism in abstract expressionist painting
had degenerated into a stale game of scandalizing the bourgeoisie, in which
the artist undertook–all too predictably–“to look at the world in a way they
[the bourgeoisie] couldn’t see, to be high, live low, stay young forever–in
short, to be the bohemian.”^46 The cultivation of originality, at least by those
means, had become a cliché. Writing in 1983 principally about the visual
arts, but generalizing to literature as well, Hal Foster notes that nowadays“a
poem or picture is not necessarily privileged, and the artifact is likely to be
treated less as aworkin modernist terms–unique, symbolic, visionary–than
as atextin a postmodernist sense–‘already written,’allegorical, contin-
gent.”^47 Under the pressure of structuralist awareness of the pervasiveness
(^45) Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, p. 23.
(^46) Tom Wolfe,The Painted Word(New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1975), p. 15.
(^47) Hal Foster,“Postmodernism: A Preface,”inThe Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture,
ed. H. Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. ix–xvi at pp. x–xi.
Originality and imagination 127