I don't like the term derivative

It was never one of my key evaluative terms frankly. I've never been that into the sort of evaluation that ranks work on the basis of its proximity to origins, its trendiness (for or against), and most certainly not on the basis of its style.

What I care about is what work does it do, for whom, when and where. If this work matters then how original, current, or beautiful also it is may be interesting but only especially important in relation to this work. I am very interested in how prismatic the projects are (I want to know work in the plural), how different they look from varying perspectives, across communities, practices, worlds, histories, actors and agencies and so on.

A dear friend and I once went to the ground-breaking Berthe Morisot retrospective at the National Gallery of Art sometime near 1987. (If I remember correctly, this was only the second major exhibition of a woman artist at the Gallery, the first having been that of Georgia O'Keeffe).

The exhibition displayed her work in relation to that of a range of other impressionists, visually making the argument of how properly it belonged within the cohort of artists tagged with that term.

My (male) friend, an art connoisseur and a historian (but not an art historian), in an action intended to be playful and humorous went from each of Morisot's oils on display, naming the (male) artist of whose work he found that painting "derivative." Thus: "Monet, Degas..." and so on.

Far from finding this humorous or fun, I was literally struck dumb with rage, a kind of rage that made me shake all over and become sick to my stomach. I knew nothing about Morisot, had never even heard of her before, but I knew in every fiber of my being that something was very wrong with this "game."

Unable to say what, unknowledgeable about these cohorts, kinships and lines of influence, feeling a bit faint with anger, I sat down on the bench with the catalog, leafing through it as I tried to breathe and clear my head.

Lines of text jumped out at me, making it clear that each of the artists my friend had named as the originators of that type of landscape, that set of objects, that technique that marked the connection from which he declaimed her work was "derivative," had, rather, been developed together with, or even markedly before the artists whose names he chanted with such victorious flair.

When I showed the text to him – and this is why he is still a dear friend – he paused and blushed deeply. Not only did he immediately recognize and reorient to this very different version of influence, but he also immediately acknowledged that the game of derivation was quite wrong in itself. Of course he knew that art and ideas and important work is collective and material and situated and doesn't exist itself enough to stabilize fictions of "origin." Indeed, all his own work has labored to demonstrate this.

How did two scholars whose own scholarship never ever wanted to inhabit the politics of the evaluative universe of "derivation" get to this awful game? How much of it was some male/female bit of awfulness, or some high art headiness, or even a kind of excitement of recognition and drama?

I don't like the term derivative, and I don't like being asked to play this game.