Opening section (p47-53): give example of Rodin. Artist left his estate to the French nation when he died inc. rights of reproduction for sculptures from casts etc. They decided to limit the number to 12. To what extent is the cast an original Rodin work?


Mechanical age of reproduction - with certain media e.g. photos, copies are a given.
"what is at stake is the aesthetic rights of style, based on a culture of originals" (pg. 53)
--- section 2
p. 53 Avant-garde has taken on many forms e.g. revolutionary, anarchist, aesthete etc. but the constant factors for avant-garde: theme of originality.
Grid - paradox
original vs. repetition
"prison in which caged artist feels liberty"
Krauss 'function of the originary status of the picture surface' = opacity of the modernist picture plane (art critic). Critic - opacity is not fiction.
Modernism & avant-garde are functions of 'discourse of originality'
Theme of originality encompasses: authenticity, originals, origins, discursive practice of museum, historian, artist'. 19C all institutions worked together to find the mark 'warrant' of ' the original'
--- section 3, p. 58
Found mark despite "ever-preesnt reality of teh copy as teh underlying condition of the original" was closer to surface of consciousness in early 19C.
e.g. Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
talks of seeing landscape in a new way because of artsy friends, different definition of beauty & taste... e.g. although it was a cloudy, rather than a sunny day, it was still beautiful
key term: the picturesque ,
Drawing & its set of decisions about effect authenticates claim to represent landscape & nature.

• Landscape has singular, set meaning. Type of painting. "Landscape is not static but is constantly recomposing itself into different, separate, or singular pictures"
• Gilpin's two different type of landscaes b/cos 2 times of day
• Key point section 3 (found on p. 62): "

  Thus what Austen's,

  Gilpin's, and the Dictionary's

  picturesque

  reveals

  to us

  is that although the

  singular and the

  formulaic

  or repetitive

  may be semantically

  opposed, they

  are nonetheless

  conditions

  of each other: the two logical halves of

  the concept landscape. The priorness and repetition of pictures is necessary to the singularity of the picturesque.." so you can only recognise something as being beautiful if you have some kind of point of reference, if you have seen something similar before or have some way of understanding it.
• = paired opposition, singular & multiple. Notion of the copy is fundamental to the notion of the original.
• Austen & Gilpin call this creating (in a way that is sort of copying so that people can appreciate & understand it) 'taste'
• Grammar of the Arts of Design by Charles Blanc - understanding Duhamps or something new
• Monet's 'pochade' / rapid sketches (also applies to paintings) signified speed & spontaneity etc. but were actually made in a very slow & painstaking way

--- Section 4 pd. 64

"What would it look like not to repress the concept of the copy?" (current day 'pictures' photos, originated w. silk screens)

"To depict is to ... refer not from a language to a referent, but from one code to another. Thus realism consists not in copying the real but in copying a (depicted) copy . . . Through secondary mimesis [realism] copies what is already a copy.' (Barthes)
Read about Levine's work (good example of point, p. 65&66)
Lavine's work launches critical attack oin work that came before it (so seems like avant-garde)
At this point, avant-garde has been divided historically... avant-garde is over but modernism still continues.
Discourse has brought avant
Complex cultural practices, post-modernist art now, make modernism void by pointing out its fictitious elements
"It is thus from a strange new perspective that we look back on the modernist origin and watch it splintering into endless replication."