"artists shouldn't repeat themselves" is a new rule

nice quote from a new yorker review of twyla tharp's latest work:

Perhaps it’s time to rethink the principle that artists shouldn’t repeat themselves. It’s a new rule. Nobody told Fra Angelico that he should stop painting the Virgin. Only in the early twentieth century, with the advent of modernism, did people start saying that artists should constantly “reinvent” themselves. Implicit in this notion is the belief that with every replay, like every dub of a videotape, there will be a loss of power, of definition. That is true in some cases; Paul Taylor is now working by formula. Conversely, however, when Merce Cunningham sought and found a mechanism that would prevent him from repeating himself—a computer program called Life Forms, which suggested to him movements that he himself could not have imagined—he weakened his work, because those movements were so strange. They looked like something out of a computer.

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