When Fran Lebowitz cracked, at the awards ceremony of the Council of Fashion Designers of America last month, that "homage is French for stealing," her remark got a laugh but also some yawns.

That Ms. Lebowitz's quip itself had a shopworn ring might be expected at a time when nearly every aspect of the culture somehow benefits from re-use. The idea is essential to post-modernism. In music it's called sampling. In high culture circles, where it's known as appropriation, it's ancient history.

It was two decades ago when the art critic Craig Wright observed that appropriation, accumulation, hybridization and other "diverse strategies" had come to characterize "much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its predecessors."

Now, those diverse strategies have become so institutionalized that when Moby turned Alan Lomax's 1930's tapes of Southern spirituals into a best-selling album of ambient music, he won Grammys and made millions. When Paul Thomas Anderson channeled Robert Altman's oeuvre, he was awarded the Palme D'Or at Cannes. When Sherrie Levine made stroke-for-stroke copies of watercolors by Mondrian, postdoctoral students lined up to write dissertations on her attenuated ironies.

... Half of fashion, in fact, seems to owe its professional existence to a single truism: one is as original as the obscurity of one's source.

But isn't this as it should be?

What is originality, anyhow? In spite of the current embrace of sampling and appropriation, "we persist as a culture in our commitment to the ideal of originality. The artist who admits to working in the manner of another artist will likely stand accused of being second rate." Wouldn't it be better to scrap the originality fetish and treat the creative act as "a combination of copyings, various and multiform"?