Theodore Dalrymple rifs on originality, the 'holy grail' of the post-modern artist:
"Compared with learning from the past, from taking what was best in it and using it to the greatest advantage to create the new, originality is a cheap and pointless goal:
[Originality] has come to poets....infinitely the inferior of Keats. Those who strive after direct originality forget that to be unlike those who have preceded us, in all the forms and methods of expression, is not by any means certainly to be either felicitous or distinguished.
Is that a lesson that one could say has been marked, learned and inwardly digested as my teachers used to demand of me, by todays artists, architects, writers and others?
The idea of originality is a complex and interesting one. I think that history [as in taking the best from] has a major part to play in the development of a creative culture and I believe that history is the subject most under attack by the deconstructionist-creative industrial complex.
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