"But you wouldn't have gotten money there anyway, if they had never produced the art." I argued.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here, but I think you're overlooking the possibility that they might have been commissioned to produce an original rather than a derivative work.
Is art, similarly to science, not an iterative process based on the input of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people that came before us?
No. It's certainly influenced by prior art, and techniques like sampling, collage, and cut-ups certainly allow for art that is comprised of prior art but rearrange in a novel way. But a lot of art is original, and speaking of someone's originality is usually one of the highest artistic compliments one can pay. I think this discounting of original work is one of the flaws of postmodernist culture, in which the referential frame is accorded equal or greater semantic weight than the content within. I may be projecting here, though.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here, but I think you're overlooking the possibility that they might have been commissioned to produce an original rather than a derivative work.
Is art, similarly to science, not an iterative process based on the input of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people that came before us?
No. It's certainly influenced by prior art, and techniques like sampling, collage, and cut-ups certainly allow for art that is comprised of prior art but rearrange in a novel way. But a lot of art is original, and speaking of someone's originality is usually one of the highest artistic compliments one can pay. I think this discounting of original work is one of the flaws of postmodernist culture, in which the referential frame is accorded equal or greater semantic weight than the content within. I may be projecting here, though.