The Creators Project: Ariana Grande’s song with Mac Miller entitled, "The Way," has been viewed 253 million times on YouTube. I can’t even hear that song anymore I’ve heard it so much. Don't get me wrong, I love it—the summer it came out, I played it in my sleep. Now I’m wondering how many kids have watched and listened to that song without recognizing that the piano melody at the core of it was taken from a Brenda Russell song back in 1979 called "A Little Bit of Love," which was then taken and sampled in the late rap singer Big Pun’s record "Still Not a Player." All before before Grande was six years old.
10 comments:
Everything is inspired by something else, whether it's someone you see on the bus or a movie or song. You could look at art and it's history as one, long, continuous entity instead of separate movements or even separate pieces.
For the freshmen design and production majors, working creatively in such a small space, there is no way our work won't influence each other's. In that sense no work is that is truly original. Creative work is more about adding your own spin to an idea inspired by something else. And that if part of the beauty of what we do to me, it's all connected.
But where this "creative borrowing" becomes a problem is when you do not know where to draw the line between inspiration and copying. Blatant stealing is always fairly obvious, but there is a huge gray area just on the other side between originality and plagiarism.
There's a quote that says "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." This is attributed to Banksy, who stole it from Pablo Picasso, who stole it from T.S. Eliot. Nothing in this world is new. The good thing about remixing is that it gives everyone in a culture a universal language. Referencing an existing work makes the audience pull from their great catalog of associations, and imbibe a work with an entire extra layer of meaning. For example, If I make a biblical reference, either the moment or the entire work that it happens in will be read or viewed with the bible in mind, creating parallels or contrast that reemphasize the importance of the story being told. I like that the video spoke about productive borrowing as much as they did about copyright law. Good art and good artists steal from everything in their lives because nothing can exist in a bubble, and relating to the outside world is was connects us to our shared cultural experience. This is only an issue when we don't acknowledge the rich cultural canon we are relying on.
The history of "remixes" goes back far beyond when copyright law was so heavily practiced. Today, with so much multimedia art being copyrighted, I wonder if there are any lawsuits that come up due to this idea of "creative borrowing." From watching bits and pieces of the video in this article, it seems like there are different degrees of creative borrowing. In general, it seems that much of the creative borrowing comes from big trends. For example, in music, multiple artists copied the same beat (and we still copy it today.) Although this wasn't copied exactly from the original, a trendy style clearly emerged.
I see this idea come up all the time for my friends who are designers. They see an idea, and without any intention of copying it, some aspect of the idea shows up in their design. This, essentially, is the entire concept of doing research before creating a design for the theatre. With that said, I also know some of my designer friends refuse to look at images of past designs for the show they are working on. I think there is a big difference between "borrowing" from past ideas of designs for show and "borrowing" from research images from magazines, books, and fine art. I would be interested to see any legal issues and outcomes that have arose due to this idea of "creative borrowing.
In this day and age it’s getting really hard for anything to be considered original. Our society is steadily hitting the limits of our era’s creative potential. I’m not saying that nothing new can be created, I’m just saying that as of right now, there isn’t enough distance between us and the audio visual creating boom that was the 1900s to look constructively back on the differences between our work and theirs. In terms of borrowing it the motive that matters. If Ariana knew that she was sampling exactly the work of Brenda Russel’s work and gave her no credit we have a problem, if the music was written and it sounds like that other song, no problem. There are only so many combinations of notes possible, and the pattern searching machine that is the human brain, is going to find ones that sound similar. So we continue to have debates now of what are the limits of copyright protection, was that mother purposely stealing Princes’ song or just filming her child? That what matters, the intent behind the borrowing.
In today's society, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to create something completely original. Everything is inspired by something, even if the artist does not realize their inspiration while creating it. This can be seen in really any art form, but it can be seen most obviously in theatre. Most every show is based on something - whether it's a movie, a book, someone's life or career, etc. Very few shows are 100% an original creative idea. Of the shows currently running on Broadway, I can only think of about two or three that are not inspired by another well-known piece. However, this is not a bad thing. Combining ideas and bringing different art forms together is how we progress. In science, one person will have an idea, and another person will build upon that idea. In theatre and in art, it is the same.
Although everything is inevitably inspired by other things, I think the line between inspiration and stealing is quite obvious. I think this problem is less severe in the US compared to other countries such as China. In China, this is a much more prevalent but (ironically) ignored problem. Copy right laws pretty much don’t exist, and thus even TV shows broadcasted on national TV blatantly copies set designs of TV shows from other countries such as Japan. Even music released by certain artists are copies of songs from other countries merely sung in Chinese. On the other hand, inspiration is completely different. To me, inspiration is necessary for growth. People build on each other’s ideas to develop a more complex one, and art should inspire one another as well.
This story reminds me personally of the defacement of Picasso's "Woman in a Red Armchair" at the Menil in Houston two years ago. The artist who did so argued that originality was dead, and that he shouldn't be expected to be original in a world which valued such works and would require him to copy this work in order to be relevant. Aside from the horrific act which he committed against one of Houston's most respected families and museums, this artist calls to mind the negative effects of the blurry line that does exist between inspiration and direct reproduction, and how that can be destructive to today's creators. Yes, it is hard to make new what has been inevitably done again and again and again. But is it that hard that an artist can find himself driven toward defacement of a master? It is equally worth pondering how fair we are being toward those artists who are simply trying to make something worthwhile that happens to take after the work of another. After all, don't great minds thing alike? As this article states, the line is blurry if at all visible. However, I think the more forgiving we can be in the exploration of this line the better. We owe it to our generation's future masters to take a step back and give credit where credit is due. Hopefully, the closer we look at this issue and the more it is examined by everyone from lawyers to creators, the better we can come to understand where the line is drawn.
This is a conversation happening in all communities of artists across industries and mediums. In music, sampling and remixing has been a hot topic for a while now, and in certain genres it is not only accepted, but expected. Hip hop tracks very frequently sample another song, or multiple, and this is growing more prevalent in pop hip hip and other pop music is it becomes “cool” to “throwback” to older songs (nod to half of the songs on billboard top 10 in the last year). Having worked as a DJ for the past 5 years, and generally having a big interest in music, I find the prevalence of sampling to be very interesting, especially when it comes up in places you don’t expect it. Like other commenters have mentioned, in contemporary art it is becoming harder to discern “original” vs. “new” and “borrowing” vs. “stealing.” The key I think is to play nice and credit others when you use their ideas, since clearly we aren’t going to stop “borrowing” anytime soon.
This article brings up a strong issue in our modern world, that it is often hard to tell the difference between creative borrowing and stealing. Because our society is so stimulus driven, and we are constantly barraged with visuals and sounds we often absorb more than we might think and infuse what we've experienced back into our own work. While there is a clear line drawn at directly stealing like discussed in Kirby Ferguson's video "Everything is a Remix" with the Led Zeppelin scenario, everything in between original work and stealing is more or less in a gray zone. I think the reason why we are so prone to "remix" work is because we have a culture of rejuvenation, in which we want to put forth our own work while paying homage to the work that inspired us/ reinventing it through our perspective. In the video, Ferguson brings up the idea that even new work isn't all that original as any work can be categorized into a genre or sub genre that encompass many very similar works. While it's a little difficult as an artist to acknowledge this perspective and accept that you may never create truly original work, it is also a positive viewpoint as it allows one to build off the foundations of others to achieve a new greater success.
In our global era, it is inevitable that designers and creators will be exposed to a slew of work from their peers. Now more than ever are ideas open to a larger audience, which comes with both positive and negative consequences. While in our society the transmission of ideas occurs much more rapidly than in generations before us, the tradition of inspiration is as old as time--themes which are fodder for creative ingenuity have been around for ages, and all artists look upon the works of their predecessors to see how timeless themes have been interpreted in their respective social construct. Despite the extensive laws which govern new inventions and ideas, there is no concrete line between being inspired by and stealing from. While this situation may never be fully resolved, it is often clear when "new" concepts have really been taken from an those that have come before. The world of fashion is the ideal microcosm to study this issue--for the amount of silhouettes that function with the human body are limited, and thus designers are challenged to create something "new" while still working upon the same structure that has been around since the beginning of time.
Post a Comment