The question of derivations, of being derivative, or
even of ‘trading in derivatives’ for that matter, are
not just questions about the status of value, but they
may very well be the defining questions of modernism and
postmodernism. Which is to say, that the constant need
to be original, to break new ground and to produce the
‘shock of the new’, was the discourse that defined what it
meant to ‘be modern’ during the first half of the twentieth
century.