This project felt different in its inception for me than other projects we have done in this class. Mainly because we got wrapped up in the excitement and entertainment value of the project much more than previous projects. This caused me to worry about the artist statement. But I found quickly that analyzing the process that we went through here in the context of plagiarism or not is an interesting discussion.
I think many times it rides on an idea or an emotion, so here it was simply the idea of what would be fun to present. The interesting thing here is with permission to “plagiarize” or use these clips without paying royalties or whatever we came up with something that didn’t feel plagiarized at all. Yet, I can’t think of a single element of our battle that did not come from some other source in some way. Our story was archetypal, which was the reason we could find so many great clips about men and monsters and the dangers of technology. I suppose what was original was how we combined those elements. I was intrigued by what Jonathan Lethem said in The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism when he talked about William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch, “I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism.” Lethem gives high praises for this book especially its originality.
So is plagiarism so bad? Well, I think actual plagiarism is bad but to add to or recombine a previous work in an interesting way is not bad. Lethem on the subject says, “If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.” (These meaning classic literature that borrows heavily from older works) So then how can we legislate plagiarism? Because taking credit for others work in short is wrong. I would assert that the difference comes in what happened during our process for the webspinna. We were using clips solely of things that already existed but I’ve never seen anyone put a clip of Neil Young with the Wizard of Oz before. Granted maybe this exact combination has occurred before but it was also given through the lense of our own creative energies which may not be new and earth shattering but is still original and personal. In short, our fingerprint was there. As we thought about science fiction that we had seen and combinations of media that expressed the idea of human vs. robots and told the narrative that we had created it became our own.
I don’t get to say this often but I think Kanye West has a good perspective on this issue. Here is a quote from Yeezy himself.
"[P]eople say, 'Why do you want to destroy your name?' But I don't care about my name as much as I care about my ideas. I could do something completely wrong, and people could hate it, but then someone else could see it and do it completely right. And it's a push forward for civilization."
What he is saying is that maybe we should think less about what is my art--what do I get credit for. Maybe we should think more about sharing art and recombining and making progress. Ultimately I don’t know how to legislate plagiarism perfectly, but if the artist has done something new with elements that already exist maybe we should calm down about plagiarism and look at the contributions they are making.
Sources
http://mic.com/articles/100778/11-times-kanye-west-actually-had-a-really-great-point
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