| What I mean by thinking of context is this: Lil Wayne has a wonderful line in his song 6'7', "real G's move in silence like lasagna". Unbelievable. Let's extrapolate that pattern: "Real H's move in silence like phonebooks". Not really the same ring to it, huh? It's not just pulling out a silent letter to emphasize the silence, but there's the context of Lil Wayne being a rapper and self-proclaimed G (gangster.) Is our extrapolation "new"? Sure, in that no one has (likely) ever said that. But while it mimics Weezy's style, it doesn't understand it's context. Similarly, if Katy Perry sang the same line as Lil Wayne, the context doesn't make sense (Katy Perry is no gangster...) EDIT A better example, specific to art, would be Warhol. He explicitly copied real-world objects as art, to create something new. But the newness wasn't that he made a clear copy, it was that his copies reflected the shift in materialism that came with mass-production. Warhol mass-producing "art" was a social comment that resonated _at that time_. His art was more than the process, it was the context in which it was made and what that said more broadly about society. That's why it resonated. |
Sorry, I'm too thick. I mentally thought of a gangster moving laterally, splayed out and wondered how it would be quiet. I had to google this to understand that he meant silence like the letter 'G' in 'lasagna'.