Week 3 Originality Essay

It’s been a while between blog posts recently. I have actually got some stuff I’ve been meaning to put up, but I’ve been a bit busy with these lectures, and with actually doing the stuff that I’ve been meaning to put up.

Okay, anyway, I’m not quite sure what’s going on with this lecture… We were given 5 principles at the beginning, and reminded of them at the end, but everything in between was filed under the first one, and I’m not sure what 3 of them even mean… But lets give it a go. Here’s this weeks essay:

This week’s lecture is on originality, or when it is okay to steal someone’s idea. The immediate reaction (or mine anyway) is that you cannot steal someone’s idea – it’s more interesting to come up with an original idea, and stealing someone else’s can get you sued. However, this is not as strict as you would immediately think. First of all, everyone is inspired by something, so all ideas come from somewhere else. In addition, as time goes on people become inspired by things that were created by people that were inspired by other things. For example; (spoiler alert if you haven’t read/watched/listened to Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings or The Ring Cycle by Wagner) The Horcruxes in Harry Potter (written over 1997-2007) are very similar in nature to the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings (written over 1937-1949), as both contain the soul of an evil being, both are central to the plot, the destruction of each are the aim in order to destroy an evil overlord, etc. In turn, Tolkien took inspiration for his world from mythology. Though it shares some of his source material, he denies taking inspiration from The Ring Cycle by Wagner (written over 1848-1874), despite the fact that two of the characteristics possessed by the One Ring (it’s malevolence and corrupting power) were not in the mythical sources, but have a central role in Wagner’s opera. You can see from this how ideas have been taken from one source to the next and passed down as inspiration. Regardless of whether you personally enjoy them, these are all fantastic forms of media, and yet the ideas are not original.

Another way in which stealing ideas is accepted practice is in recontextualisng them. This is to take an old idea, and put it into a new context, thus creating something new and interesting and perhaps relevant to contemporary culture. This can occur in varying degrees, with different ramifications. For example, the (rather appropriate) quote by Picasso "The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal", stolen by Banksy (pictured below) makes for an ironic piece of work that is funny in a quirky sort of way. The act of stealing is itself the artwork in this case.

The work of Banksy is controversial – he is considered by many to be a vandal, due to the nature of most of his work. In this he is somewhat similar to the Chapman brothers, who have previously been accused of ‘cultural vandalism’. Their work involves taking classical masterpieces and defacing them. 

Chapman brothers 'vandalism' on the right, next to Goya's original Contra el bien general

They consistently seek to overstep social boundaries, and in doing so they create pieces of work that are built on provocation, rather than being an inherently original idea. In this sense, how original the idea is, is irrelevant. The purpose is to provoke; there is an argument in there, and it redefines the whole notion of what art can be.