Originality

As I mentioned in a previous post, Linda was here this week. This meant adventuring to new neighborhoods, visiting new art galleries, discovering new beautiful buildings and corners of the city, being introduced to new types of coffee, eating delicious food, (Baccala, which is creamy-pureed-dried-salted-cod, a Venetian specialty, being her new favorite,) conversing about art and life, (two of our favorite topics,) and being reunited with New York City.

In my mind, Linda has always been representative of New York City. Yeah she may be from Kansas City, but she's lived in NYC for longer than I, and she's totally the quintessential New Yorker; you know, the artsy type who's always running from meetings at museums, to get-togethers with friends, to some hidden chocolate shop or patisserie to pick up a perfect little treat that might get squished on her way uptown but is destined to be utterly delicious nonetheless. She's the type who always knows the best place to find anything one might want or need, from food, to clothes, to beautiful things, to services, etc, in NYC or abroad. Oh, and she has the best taste in everything. As I think about it, perhaps you don't know a Linda type, because truthfully I don't really know anyone else like Linda. Linda is unique.

Unique is a funny word. On my Heschel high school application I was asked a very strange question: "what one quality makes you unique?" Well, I guess the question isn't as strange as asking what your preschooler's greatest accomplishment is, which is a question that’s asked on many NYC preschool applications, but that's a side point...

Anyway, I responded with a critique of the question. No one quality makes me unique. Any one thing I think, feel, love, or do, has certainly been experienced by someone else before, thus the only thing that is unique about me is the amalgamation of qualities that I embody, passions that I have, and experiences that I've lived through and learned from, which together make me who I am. And the best part is that at any given moment we are all in states of evolution. In other words, I am Gabriella-ing, Linda is Linda-ing, and the rest of you are in the midst of your own processes. And those combinations, those processes, are precisely what make us each unique.

With that said, it is natural that we seek to find what makes us, and the things we love and find interesting, unique. This desire stems from a fear, or a distaste for being a copy, or nothing but a number.

This is a feeling we often project upon works of art. We long to find works that we consider original – a sentiment I expressed in relation to Erwin Wurm’s work, which sparked interesting conversation about unique-ness and originality among my friends. (See their posts in response to my post.) Though we tend to agree that different feelings are produced by seeing, or experiencing art that we deem unique, we may not agree on what is unique or reappropriated, original or imitated. Regardless, we deal with this desire to find what is original, by using language to convince others of our point of view.

So desperate to communicate the experiences we feel, we continuously clarify ourselves, using a continuum of terms… We converse, and sometimes argue, but in the end there is no getting it right, because ultimately the question of uniqueness, the question of originality, is all a matter of interpretation. However, the reasons for those differences in opinions, along with the differences in the ways we express them, in and of themselves lie at the heart of what makes us each unique.

On that note, I can confidently say that Linda is among the most unique people I have met, and New York is among the most unique cities I have been to. And god, less than 48 hours after Linda has gone, I’m missing her and missing New York more than ever. But, leave it to New York Magazine, the most unique magazine I know, to come up with an article that reminds a girl that there is no place like home, at least if New York is where you call home… Check out New York Magazine’s "The Ultimate New York Playlist": http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/03/the_ultimate_new_york_playlist.html