CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE

Prior to the Enlightenment, art was understood as an imitation, and plagiarism was more or less well-accepted, since it made possible for artworks to reach those areas where they would otherwise be unknown and also helped to avoid the privatization of culture. However, the advent of the Enlightenment began to promote the myth of a negative plagiarism: it started to be viewed as the theft of language, ideas, and images by the less than talented, often for the enhancement of personal fortune or prestige.

At this particular turning point, Critical Art Ensemble proposes the reverse of the myth, so that we can begin to think it is those who support the legislation of representation and the privatization of language that are suspect, and the plagiarists are those who contribute most to cultural enrichment (under certain conditions). Nowadays (an era of recombinant and digitalization), thus, new technologies make plagiarism an acceptable and even crucial strategy.

Basically, the recombinant's theory is based on the following ideas:

• plagiarism and copying has always been a key to the meanings evolution as well as for the invention
• in societies dominated by a "knowledge" explosion, exploring the possibilities of meaning in that which already exists is more pressing than adding superfluous and redundant information
• accepting plagiarism as a productive strategy does not completely mean abandoning the romantic model of production (which may be considered an anachronistic conception, though timely useful/required)

The most interesting point of the article is, perhaps, what were the consequences of the IT introduction on such concepts as "author" or "linear text”. On the one hand, the concept of “author” in a romantic way has stopped working and has become an abstract aggregate(Barthes and Foucault). On the other, hypertextuality has played (and plays) a key role in the recombinant culture (from Vanevar Bush, with his prototype Memex, until Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the www) that has made possible for production, distribution and consumption processes to become a single act, without a closed and categorized beginning and ending. Therefore, the article invites us to rethink the idea of plagiarism and reap the benefits of the present recombination methodology.

"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp (1917). This urinal has become a symbol of the ready-made art, one of the many expressions of the recombinant strategy.