Magritte et al

Some artists' work seem to make it impossible to make anything new. You're burdened by their achievements, kinda thing.

Like this:

I never used to like Magritte (for he is in truth the author of said painting), I thought he was a big cheeseball, because he was popular and accessible in the same way Klimt or Dali are, or something. But I keep running up against him. Recently (in Tokyo) I saw a whole lot of his paintings in the flesh and I just yielded. They were great; he's great. But they are really like a complete circle that appears to close off that territory for the artists that follow (like Duchamp's readymades I guess).

I saw a poster made by an artist once that listed all the object-territories captured by various artists, like:

Beuys owns felt
Kusama owns dots
(etc etc)

I often think of it. There are territories I'm interested in that I feel that way about. Like, Magritte owns semiotics, Schwitters owns collage, Andrea Fraser owns institutional critique, Thomas Demand owns models, and so on. I realise this is an uber-reductive way to think about artists, but that doesn't stop it feeling inhibiting.

But anyway, one's own desires for worldly success aside (because obviously the PR-driven media, time-poor curators and confused audiences prefer neatly packaged artist oeuvres), who wants to inhabit a bounded territory like that? How boring. That's like having to write romantic fiction or something. It's a big fat trap.

/obvious