what's in the art?

There are a multitude of examples out there of original artworks that have been appropiated by people, other artists/thieves who couldn't come up with an original concept on their own. I'm not talking about perfectly normal cross pollination between artworks, artists, and ideas that goes on everywhere and lends a sense of collective gestalt to different groups of image makers. The people I'm talking about, one could imagine, are out to make a buck or to otherwise capiltalize on an image that has worked for someone else, or maybe, more innocently they actually conceived of the same type of image independently. There could be some cause for concern about this piracy if what we were doing was simply making images, commodities, cutsie wootsie items to peddle on the web or elsewhere, but I hope as artists we are seeking more than that. And in this regard, the focus changes from what is made to the making of the thing, and what that thing contains. In other words, I believe that the work, unless it is a digital or specifically made for the web, cannot be summed up by its representation on a computer and so then it can't be completely stolen. In a great work of art, there is the unique psychological, sensorial, physiological experience of the piece that is more alive and present than even the paint itself. This is a view of art as related to some universal, spiritual, collective unconscious of which we may be a participant, and which we are humbled and lit on fire in the midst of, cooled by mists and and settled into a cradle of self-ness. Speaking with Judy Glantzman today, some sleeping zombie within, stripped of the sacred, was draped again in a robe of meaning. This idea that the unspeakable, the unknowable can somehow be reached for, maybe never possessed, but reached for melts away all concern about petty criminals and whether someone is stealing an image of your work. It's the difference between stealing a photo and stealing a soul.