The Paradox of Style as a Concept of Art

When style seems to have been an unobservable feature in images before the era of art, it became the normative and qualitative property during Early Modern times, and thus copying became the most prominent activity in the teaching and progress of art. What was aimed at was not so much the copy of the image, but rather to master the stylistic qualities of, say, a Rembrandt or a Raphael. Not so anymore. During Modernism, imitation of another artist's style is regarded as plagiarism, that is, issuing another's work as your own and is generally regarded as the most embarrasing an artist can do, and as such stands in contradiction to our very concept of art. Still, plagiarism has been, and is a prominent unrecognized feature in the artistic production for more than a century. This is, I believe, because our concept of art entails an antinomy: on the one hand: plagiarism is forbidden (you are not an artist and you do not produce art); on the other hand: if an artistic style is not copyied, it ceases to exist, and hence the antinomy: art has to embrace precisely that which it has to reject.To substantiate this claim I will look at the time when style ceased to be a normative and qualitative concept to evolve into an "author function" during the 1860s with three coincident cases, i.e. the Musée des copies, the Bastianini-case and the succès de scandale of Courbet and Manet, all of which exemplary demonstrates a clash between two different concepts of art and the birth of our modern system of visual art. The key feature in this victorious system, I argue, is that it replaces the (first order) representational image with an iconoclasm of the first order image together with an introduction of an "image of a second order." The image of a second order is the hypostasization of traces and indices to icons. An image of the second order is essentially treating style as image. It functions exactly as images before the era of art, that is: an authoritative reproducendum without any original, contradicting the same modern system of visual art from which it stems