"Who knows where ideas come from? They just appear."
They don't, actually.
Something I think most artists, thinkers, whatever, have trouble with is the very
idea of originality. What is an original thought? Is there a finite amount of originality out there, like everything else; are we just recycling the same tripe that's always been lying around?
I don't have an answer to that, but there are some distinct points along the continuum of creativity.
Outright plagiarism is pretty rampant. It's both easier to do and to catch people at it since the advent of Google. When I was a TA of a second-year English class teaching some of the most difficult texts in the literary canon to 18-year-olds I read a paper on Jane Austen's
Mansfield Park that opened with an argument about the text's "readable spaces" - a fairly advanced literary concept. To find the un-cited source article for this essay (worth only 10% of the final grade), all I had to do was type six words into my search bar. Academic misconduct is funny: this student must have spent the better part of an hour cutting and pasting (or, maybe even re-typing) the entirety of a published article into her word processor. The astonishing thing is that, when caught and
not expelled or even barred from the course, she failed to show up for another class or even turn in another assignment and got a zero on the course.
Derivative works are also fairly standard: everyone borrows. Usually it's something funny we see or hear that we repeat. Of course, the assumption is that our friends are also part of the audience and therefore in on the joke - it's understood that those within earshot know you're parroting and the expectation is that someone will deliver the punchline to your set-up ("And I thought these things smelled bad ... __ ___ ________" -
Han Solo Star Wars, episode V: The Empire Strikes Back). However, when works of supposed artistic merit are so heavily influenced by preceding works, even if that work is by the same artist, the veracity, conviction, and value of an object as well as its creator are called into question.
Homage walks the fine line between a copy and something new. Usually, a simple nod to a previous work, or an imitation that is so obvious as to point to itself, is reference/reverence enough to excuse the overlap between the new and the old; but the homage must be in the context of reinvention. It has to add something, comment, or renew the essence of the precedent.
Satire is the other side of the coin: it points and laughs, pushing the original into the absurd and undermining it for its lack of initial value.
Originality might be a myth, since nothing exists in a vacuum and a thing wholly unknown has no meaning because it can only be defined against that which it is not - it's a semiotic necessity that an apple is an apple because it's not an orange. But, for the sake of argument, let's say that an original work takes the thing it's referencing (or referential to) and does something unexpected or innovative. Not just
does something, but
says something that we haven't heard or seen before - not in that context anyway.
Art challenges us, it causes discomfort, it evokes strong feelings, it makes us think about things in new, critical and, some might say, original ways. It's a tough nut to crack, and that's why there's so much uselessly bad art out there.
At least we're still trying.
Unfortunately, academic rigour and critical thought are lacking outside and, perhaps more sadly, inside our intellectual institutions and people use the world wide web as a textual compost heap, taking anything they please and passing it off as their own to impress their friends and anonymous followers. The
culture of embedding makes it just as easy to pretend you're something that you're not as it does to share and amplify veritable works of art and original content - in fact, the marriage of the two is exactly how the whole thing functions on a cultural level.
The process of eroding the immediacy and liveness of art is lamented by
Walter Benjamin in "
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (
Illuminations 1936). Benjamin published his thoughts when print-making was enjoying its heyday, well before the age of digital reproduction; but his arguments are even more applicable to an era in which copyright laws are meaningless and a person's social clout is measured by how many hits, retweets, friends and followers they have.
Ironically, the best way to obtain these digital-world metrics is to recycle the mounds of innocuous, servile, and sycophantic
codswallop available on-line and claim it as one's own. We're now able to claim ownership of an idea by virtue of discovery using the search tools bestowed upon us by a glorified advertising agency.
Google has made us
archaeologists,
digging through the slag heap
of the future in search of
our own forgotten present.
For too many of us, this has destroyed the meaning of art. It's now something we consume, regurgitate, and pass along. The intrinsic value of artwork - the pleasure of reflexivity and the intellectual or emotional growth that it produces - has been superseded by the speculative value of cultural capital as a derivative in the social media stock market.
Art is dead. We killed it. We're still killing it still. Right now.
Every link, every RT, every time we copy, paste, drag, drop, import, embed, stream, and on and on and on.... every ailing reproduction of a work of art and the process by which we claim it as our own discovery undermines the specificity of art. It's moment of creation, it's conception, is dashed against the rocks by the sea of information that swells against the breakers a little higher with every tide.
What's left? Hang on, I'll tell you:
the work.
I'm no longer keeping track of how many people view this blog. Why? Because this blog is here for me to work. It's a space in which I can write and interested parties can read. That's it. It's not going to make me famous, it's not going to make me money, it's not going bring me followers or glory or notoriety. It's here for the work, because that's what matters, because that's all that's left after everything beautiful has been digitized for posterity and export.
* a little over a month ago I posted a passage from a Neil Gaiman novel. Though I cited the author and the work at the bottom of the post, I neglected to place quotation marks around the passage. This created some confusion, and was corrected shortly after the issue was brought to my attention. My apologies to Mr Gaiman - I hope we can still be friends, but not on facebook.
