Borrowing was once viewed negatively as a violation of originality, but in contemporary art, it has become an important creative practice that reinterprets existing works and gives them new meaning.
Borrowing used to have a negative connotation in the art world, which emphasizes originality. Only original artwork that contains an individual’s originality is authentic, and borrowing was generally rejected. This is because artists create artworks based on their own unique style and creativity, and the idea of borrowing from others was thought to devalue their work. However, today, especially in contemporary art, borrowing takes many forms. Artists are exploring ways to borrow existing works to give them new meaning or to reinvent them with a modern twist.
For example, Picasso’s The Handmaids borrows from Velázquez’s The Handmaids, and Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q borrows from Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. These examples don’t simply copy the original works, but shed new light on their social and cultural context or reinterpret them from a contemporary perspective. This is where we need to distinguish between “acceptable borrowing” and “unacceptable borrowing” in artistic terms. Generally speaking, forgery and plagiarism are considered unacceptable borrowing, while parody and pastiche are considered acceptable borrowing.
Forgery is the intentional fabrication of a work’s production history and requires the intent to deceive. Plagiarism is the act of presenting someone else’s work as your own, which is taboo in the creative world where originality is valued. Forgery and plagiarism share a common intent to deceive: forgery parasitizes on the authority of the original work to cover itself up, while plagiarism conceals the original work in order to confer authority on the plagiarist. These behaviors erode trust in the art world, violate the rights of the creator, and ultimately undermine the very essence of art.
Parody, on the other hand, is usually intended to be satirical. It is an artistic work that imitates the original work, but with humor and criticism that derives meaning from the original work beyond the original. Therefore, parody aims to criticize or create irony by quoting the original work rather than the uniqueness of the work. Linda Hutcheon has argued that parody is achieved when a critical distance from the original work is created by a “structural addition” to the text. The critical distance required by parody presupposes that the original work being parodied has value and that the reader is aware of that fact.
However, unlike parody, pastiche imitates existing works without the intention of criticizing or satirizing them. With the development of popular culture, the notion of authenticity and scarcity of the original work has been deconstructed, and pastiche has emerged, which appropriates the formal components and techniques of the original work. This kind of borrowing is not only nostalgic for the past, but also uncritical. In other words, “there is no original text,” “stylistic reforms are no longer possible,” and “the negative connotations of plagiarism are deconstructed.” In this case, pastiche is an attempt to deconstruct the value of the original, which can itself be paradoxically original. In this context, pastiche has become an important aspect of contemporary art, and it’s closely related to the development of reproduction technology and the spread of digital culture.
In the future, borrowing will become even more prevalent in art. This process will raise numerous philosophical, aesthetic, and critical issues, which will call us from time to time to a testing ground that will require deep insights into the culture of writing and the context of art and life. In addition, the debate among artists and critics will continue about how borrowing expands or blurs the boundaries of creation, which is an important key to understanding the rich diversity of contemporary art.
