Unoriginal Uncreativity

In his interview with 34th Street magazine, Kenny Goldsmith mentions that he switched over from the visual arts to literary arts because uncreativity, while it had been practiced in the visual for years, hadn’t quite infiltrated the literary arts yet. I wholly disagree with the assertion that he’s the founder of the “uncreative” movement in the literary genre. Uncreative literature has been practiced as far back as at least the Renaissance (perhaps earlier – this is as far back as I have some familiarity).
Emulato non imitato, meaning emulate, don’t imitate, is a mantra which was embodied by many artists of the Renaissance –including painters, sculptors, musicians, and yes, even writers. Yet it was a common practice for even the best writers to copy the manuscripts of other writers (normally either their colleagues or the masters) in order to physically connect with the writing process of another: complete imitation. In this same vein, I think it could be argued that scribes (who date back even before the Renaissance) were actually the originators of the uncreative writing genre.
The world of text was revolutionized in 1440 with the invention of the printing press, which was arguably also a revolutionary device in the field of uncreative writing. Now, no longer did scribes have to physically write out each letter, meaning that connection with the text was lost to a large extent. What the printing press did, essentially, was to impersonalize the act of textual reproduction – which not only put innumerable scribes out of work, but also caused them to lose the physical connection they had with text in general.
However, the printing press made uncreative writing a process which was quicker and more efficient than it had ever been. Now, rather than copies of text taking days or months to reproduce, the process took much less time, meaning non-original works could be transmitted much more rapidly (meaning: though text may have been somewhat original at the time of conception, only the manuscript itself could be considered original – the copies from the printing press were merely non-original reproductions). Thus, uncreative writing became ever more pervasive in a rapidly changing world.
Since the invention of the printing press almost six hundred years ago, writing and text-reproducing technologies have expanded at an unprecedented pace. Over the past two-hundred years especially, innovations in text-reproduction have been profound. The early 1800s saw the invention of the typewriter, which was subsequently revamped and updated for the next two centuries until it gave way to the word processor. This latter invention was rather short-lived, however, due to its quick obsolescence once the computer was introduced. With computers came such text tools as scanning, copy and pasting, and most recently, OCR (short for optical character recognition) which have allowed individuals more efficiently explore their uncreative sides.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding Goldsmith’s definition of “uncreative writing;” however, given what he said in his 34th Street interview, I cannot with good conscience categorize his version of uncreative writing as something new and revolutionary.