The great trouble with art in this country [the United States] at present, and apparently in France also, is that there is no spirit of revolt— no new ideas appearing among the younger artists. They are following along the paths beaten out by their predecessors, trying to do better what their predecessors have already done. In art there is no such thing as perfection. And a creative lull occurs always when artists of a period are satisfied to pick up a predecessor’s work where he dropped it and attempt to continue what he was doing. When on the other hand you pick up something from an earlier period and adapt it to your own work an approach can be creative. The result is not new; but it is new insomuch as it is a different approach.

(Duchamp, 1946)

In today’s society, it is irrefutable that the creative capacity of young artists has indeed declined. There may be many reasons for this, but I think one of the main ones is that modern design has largely satisfied the needs of people’s lives. Young artists and designers will of course think of new innovations, but when they look them up on the internet, they will always find that their ideas have already been developed or even perfected by others. For example, my friends and I once conceived a cooker that we named the All-in-One Hot Pot and Girll Pan, which allows people to cook both hot pot and barbecue at the same time. As I had studied industrial design in my undergraduate degree, I had the experience and ability to design products accordingly, so we even started to draw up and perfect the product design. However, one day when I was browsing the online community, I found that someone had already made the same product and formed a well-established chain of products that were already being advertised and sold on the internet. Even in recent years, self-service restaurants that use the corresponding cooking products for both hot pot and barbecue have appeared in mainland China. As the construction of these existing pots and pans was so similar to what we had conceived, we could not continue with the previous product design, which could easily be defined as plagiarism – even though we did not refer to any of the existing online products when we came up with the idea in question.

On the other hand, the development of art and technology go hand in hand, with advances in technology promoting inspiration and breakthroughs in design. With the development of modern technology, a large number of new technologies are being used in people’s art, and artists can use a wider variety of production processes, materials and energy sources to meet their design needs. The widespread use of electricity in human life today has led to the development of electrical design and lighting art; the invention of materials such as plastic has allowed for more colourful artwork and facilitated the shaping of products; technology has even led to new artistic professions and projects – there was no such profession as web designer before the advent of the internet. The development and proliferation of various OERs could not have been achieved without the help of the Internet. Humanity has divided its society into different areas such as economics, science, politics and art, but in fact all these areas develop in a way that affects each other. And in today’s global economic recession and bottlenecked scientific progress, new artistic design is much more difficult compared to the age of the technological explosion. Although today’s science and technology still allows artists to use some of the new technologies in their work, the distribution of design, its acceptance and the ability and willingness of the public to pay for it are still issues that artists and designers need to consider today.

That said, I don’t entirely agree with Mr Duchamp’s notion that ” a creative lull occurs always when artists of a period are satisfied to pick up a predecessor’s work where he dropped it and attempt to continue what he was doing.” — although it is true that designing only in the footsteps of one’s predecessors can accordingly cause a creative slump in other areas of art. But in the same field, the act of polishing and embellishing the work of those who have gone before is in fact essential in the development of art. The development of art is like a relay race, it is iterated from one generation to the next. Since I started studying design as an undergraduate, I have been taught that the origin of design is to make people’s lives better. As Maslow’s theory suggests, people’s needs are arranged from lower to higher levels. When an art design is created, it may only be used to satisfy the lowest level of physiological needs, for example, clothing was originally created to cover the body and keep out the cold, and the earliest clothing was often made of animal skins or woven from leaves and vines. As human society developed, the need for clothing became more demanding and many designers began to work in the field of clothing design. Nowadays, the art of clothing needs to meet not only the physical needs of people, but also the higher psychological needs of people. Today’s clothing can reflect the taste, profession, gender and social status of the wearer. It would not have developed to the extent that it has without the successive generations of designers.

But I agree with Mr Duchamp’s subsequent notion that “When on the other hand you pick up something from an earlier period and adapt it to your own work an approach can be creative.” This was something I experienced accordingly in this course, as we first took over a score from the teacher and went through it. Our score was very simple and monotonous, it was about using numbers to walk through a large space. We were allowed to pick 3-5 points and pick two numbers from 1-9 to express how fast we walked between the points and how long we stayed at each point. As everything is self-determined, the rules seem very ambiguous, and as there is no standardisation, different interpretations and implementation criteria between people can create confusion in the score. We followed up the process by specifying the locations within the library and created a new score, rework the library, by using the rules of connecting dots to each other. we asked participants to take 3 locations from the librarian and choose their favourite book from these locations and create a new story by extracting and combining a sentence from the book. This was our group’s experience about adapting the work and we believe that through this method more people can use our scores to create something new.

Learning Sprint 2 | Play: Reflective Analysis / Yushan Zhao / Themes in Contemporary Art (2022-2023)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0