Blog
Tyranny of originality
Sunday 8 August 2004
There is a sort of ‘tyranny of originality’ in this society.
The way I see it, there’s no dishonor in doing something that’s been done before. The great early epics and myths came about through telling and retelling, and evolved over time - probably becoming more resonant with their audiences all the while. Vernacular building ‘architecture’ works because its patterns contain the accumulated wisdom of generations.
Culture doesn’t grow through everyone holing up in bunkers and doing everything they can to avoid repeating themselves, or anyone else. It grows by people building on one another’s work, taking existing ideas and using them to new ends.
(All the same, I run into these kinds of internal objections a lot, for example, when I do music - crap, I don’t want it to sound too much like (whatever). One of the ways I’m getting around it is through things like the Song-A-Day? project - challenging myself to work fast, so as to shut up a lot of those internal censors.)
J wrote a while back about ‘genius’ and how elevating someone (van Gogh was his example) to the level of genius subtly forbids everyone else from participating. “Oh, you can’t be an artist! You’re not a genius like him!” ...bollocks, and too widespread an attitude altogether.
In contrast, Brian Eno came up with the idea of “scenius”:
“I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.”
— from a letter to Dave Stewart, in A Year With Swollen Appendices
(The term ‘tyranny of originality’ is used sometimes in business to refer to what’s called the “Not Invented Here” syndrome.)