How Do We Know What We Like? The Ecstasies and Anxieties of Art

February two, 2007

The Ecstasy of Influence

The Ecstasy of Influence

We tin't terminate talking about Jonathan Lethem'due south essay in this calendar month'due south Harper'south. If yous haven't read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post volition exist nearly as interesting. Get ahead. And this postal service will still be here when you lot return. You know you desire to.

Nearly every discussion of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and and then cobbled together with a large dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole. Even the "I"s aren't Jonathan Lethem; they're Jonathan Rosen writing in The Talmud and the Internet about John Donne, or William Gibson in a Wired commodity almost William Burroughs, or David Foster Wallace on a grad school seminar, or Brian Wilson in a Beach Boys song.

But this is more a stunt. It's a passionate salvo in the copyright wars, a crowd of voices coralled together to say, basically: without borrowing, stealing, cribbing, remixing, mashing-up, collaging and compiling — without influences great and small, in other words — there is no "creating." No hip hop, certain, but also no blues, no Disney, no Shakespeare. No Lolita or "I have a dream." Nosotros'd be reduced to staring at campfires and barking at ane another.

So how to think about the joys, perils, and contradictions of influence in our intellectual property age? Lethem wonders himself:

I pay rent with the price my words bring when published in glossy magazines and at the aforementioned moment offering them for nearly nothing to impoverished literary quarterlies, or speak them for gratuitous into the air in a radio interview. So what are they worth?

Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence, Harper's, February 2007

What are those words — or notes, or castor strokes, or abstract ideas — worth? Who owns them? (And what does buying mean?) And for how long?

Jonathan Lethem

Author, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and the forthcoming You Don't Honey Me Still, among many others

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Associate Professor of Culture and Communication, New York Academy

Blogger, SIVACRACY.Cyberspace

Author, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How information technology Threatens Inventiveness

Mark Hosler

Founding member, Negativland

Mike Doughty

Solo musician

Sometime guitarist and pb singer, Soul Coughing

Extra Credit Reading

You can notice Greta's Female parent of All Reading Lists hither. She spent all twenty-four hours on it. Information technology volition make her very happy if you go check it out.

Update, two/7 12:30pm

Mark Hosler of Negativland was kind plenty to transport me a few MP3 from their latest album, No Concern. I asked him if he'd mind if nosotros posted them on site. His reply: "I don't requite a s**t what you do with them!" Well, this is what we're doing:

No Business organisation

Downloading

Favorite Things

3:35

As a author I inherit one set of assumptions near copying or borrowing, or what's chosen plagiarism, just as a music fan, someone who adores sampling and quotation and allusion in the music I heed to, and as a fan of collage and cribbing in the visual arts, many of the artists I grew upward liking in these different realms were instinctive plagiarists, by the standards that I often come across practical within the literary arts.

Jonathan Lethem

9:20

I was trained showtime as a painter, and I came to recollect of things forth those lines, whereas and so many other writers come out of either academic writing outset, where they've written a lot inside the context of academy — they've written a dissertation or innumerable papers before they brainstorm writing fiction or something that's exterior of that framework — or they work as journalists — they do a lot of stuff within the journalistic context. At present, if you await at what writers inherit from the context of the university and from journalism, at that place's a lot of emphasis put on the ideals of copying. Anybody'south very conscious that to exist a proper student you lot musn't plagiarize. And everyone's conscious that to be a good working journalist, y'all musn't cobble together your pieces besides much or also manifestly from preexisting journalism. I didn't remember that style. I thought, to be a skillful creative person you're probably going to be cobblig together stuff from all sorts of sources, because every creative person I admired seemed to practise that.

Jonathan Lethem6>

16:30

What we think of as open source is is basically civilization. It's how human beings accept organized themselves, communicated with each other, joined each other, forged identities, and most importantly, grooved and danced, for centuries. This is basically how people take always dealt with each other. It's just in recent years we've imposed these interesting cages — legal cages, psychological cages, ethical cages — around this level of sharing.

Siva Vaidhyanathan

eighteen:30

Then we have, in the public discourse, a blending of anxieties about plagiarism and anxieties nigh copyright infringement, which are in fact ii very different acts. Plagiarism is an ethical abrogation. It's 1 in which you violate the norms of in interpretive community or a artistic community, either a grouping of academics or scientists, or a group of poets or songwriters, and each of these communities has its own set of rules, as Jonathan explained. And when it comes correct down to it, what we think of as plagiarism, the theft of ideas, is really something that falls outside of copyright. Copyright does not protect ideas.

Siva Vaidhyanathan

27:35

It feels like you're having this really conversational dialogue with this mass culture that'due south being shoved down your throat whether you similar information technology or not, and why do I demand to ask permission to exercise that? No 1 asked me permission to put up a Pepsi billboard near my home. And so I'thou non certain why I have to ask permission to take some part of a Pepsi advert and cut it up. In a style, it'south a very common sense argument.

Mark Hosler

43:40

The lawyers actually hired a forensic musicologist to get through the tune and discover what exactly had been stolen, if anything. And his decision was: well, at that place is a example that "Milk shake Your Bon-Bon" is taken from "Super Bon Bon," however, we are certain that information technology's an exact rip of "Shake Your Groove Thing," the old disco song. And then I didn't go any coin.

Mike Doughty

50:05

I retrieve it'south terribly important that artists remember to exist grateful for their date with an ongoing cultural discourse, that they came from somewhere, and their stuff — if they're lucky — will be entered into the language of culture and get useful to others.

Jonathan Lethem

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Source: https://radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/

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