The Originality of the Avant-Garde

Krauss's 1981 essay "The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition"—and the 1985 book collecting it—dismantled the central myth organizing modern art: that the avant-garde produced genuinely new forms through the radical break with tradition. Examining Rodin's bronzes (reproductions masquerading as originals), the grid's compulsive recurrence across modernist painting, and the readymade's citational structure, Krauss demonstrated that originality was a myth whose function was to organize cultural value rather than to describe ontological reality. Each avant-garde movement claimed to begin again, and each claim repeated the structure of every previous claim. The repetition was concealed by the very rhetoric of originality that each movement deployed, and the concealment was not accidental but constitutive—modernism required the myth of the new to legitimate its practice. AI makes this myth untenable by producing apparent novelty with such ease and volume that the currency is debased, forcing the question Krauss posed four decades ago: if originality is abundant, what evaluative framework can replace it?