Blog #4

In the article The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism by Johnathan Lethem a series of questions are imposed in the subject of the arts, or rather on the copying of the arts. Throughout the article Lethem asks questions about the nature of plagiarism, in a society where the word "sue" and "copyright" are everyday words, what does it mean to us when art is "stolen." He mentions that Thomas Jefferson saw copyright law as a necessary evil, something that was more in place to advance the progress of the arts. It is impossible to truly define what is stealing and what isn't, he mentions Bob Dylan's ideas about appropriation, or the borrowing of someone's ideas and implementing them somewhere else. Is this stealing? Its pretty impossible to draw a clear cut line, does someone's influence on you and your use of their ideas in your own creations count as theft? In a capitalist society where art is viewed as a commodity and where money makes everything happen, copyright is in place to protect one's intellectual property, or rather to make sure that you are paid handsomely when someone takes a few to many liberties with it. Lethem poses the question "is that right?" Well there is no real answer, our society is the way it is and that's pretty much final. But where is it that we draw the line. He mentions a music historians conversation with Muddy Waters, Waters sings him a song that he wrote, describes when he wrote it and why. The historian notices similarities to a song written by the extremely influential blues man Robert Johnson and asks Waters if he knows anything about the song. To his surprise Waters recounts that he heard the song by Johnson from his own teacher, he recounted his own personal conception of the song while at the same time acknowledging the source of influence, there was no concept of stealing, it was simply part of the creative process. Finally what I found a very interesting addition to the paper is at the end Lethem broke down every paragraph of his paper and revealed the sources of his sentences, the whole time he had been making references to all sorts of creative media, whether the reader picked up on it or not, and cited every one from movies to books to quotations. I found this the strongest part of the article, a cementing of the idea that our society is made of its past and indeed its influences.
My own impression of the article is on of fascination, its something that I have thought of many times myself. We are built on our influences, nearly everything we do is in some way drawn from something that we have taken in at some point. In fact I would maintain that the things that we collectively experience in that exact combination is what makes each of us individuals, an individual formed out of other people's ideas. Indeed it seems that no one example of art contains no reference to something that came before, whether the artist is aware of it or not. Our idea of aesthetics comes just as much from our evolution as it does our personal ideas of what looks or sounds good, which just ties back to the things that we have seen. I found the article very informing and well through out and indeed readily added to my own thoughts on the nature of plagiarism and influence.