You're Not Original, but That's Ok...

This started as a comment on my brother's blog, but ballooned so quickly that I felt I might post it here. What intrigued me, aside from his profuse swearing, were the words about stealing or copying. This is something that’s driving me up a wall lately and I feel compelled to unleash a fury of repressed thoughts on the subject.

In short, I’m ever so tired of our culture’s obsession with “stealing ideas”. I can’t be sure how what follows would work outside the realm of art, but inside, the bullshit must stop. The idea that anyone’s ever had an idea uninfluenced by something or someone else is complete nonsense. Especially in our era, where artists are ever so connected with other across the globe. The internet is a wonderful thing, encouraging the exchange of our ideas, letting us rapidly iterate and evolve our approaches so that all of us become better more skillful artisans. Art as a whole is benefiting from this, allowing for wonderful cross pollination creating new blends of just about anything. Sure, we’re ever more aware of how average we all are and just how many insanely talented people are just around the corner but this is not something we should worry ourselves over. We especially needn’t be so damn sensitive over who did what first or who borrowed from who. Every single artist has borrowed/stolen a method/idea/etc at some point and continues to. In order not to would require isolation impossible in today’s world. Not to mention the mere volume of art online today means a highly increased chance of multiple people creating similar work even if they’ve not been influenced by one another.

Why am I really talking about this? Because where I work, we have a jackass team of lawyers analyzing every visual we make, trying to find an existing counterpart that shares even a shred of similarity what we’ve created. If such a connection is found (and one can make a connection with ANY visual) we’re immediately told we can’t use it. They don’t research into whether the connection is strong enough to be copyright infringement, because doing so would be an exhaustive task, and having a 6-figure salary means you shouldn’t have to exert any due diligence. The effect of this is obvious: visuals become more generic to avoid being sued, artists are beat down and trained to create mediocrity, their time is wasted in needless revisions and ultimately you have non-artists telling a professional what they can and can’t make. I’d wonder what they’d say if I started telling them how to be a better prick. No one likes a backseat driver.

Not only do we suffer as artists for the squeamish premature censorship of the fun police, but consumers too, who want entertaining products (we make video games) are left with an abhorrently homogenized product that doesn’t satisfy them. Meanwhile, consumers are treated to more remakes of movies/games that weren’t worth a damn in the first place and sequels upon sequels upon sequels upon sequels upon sequels upon sequels. So while we artists are making leaps and bounds personally through internet fellowship, art that reaches the masses is degrading at such a rate one can’t even fathom it. All of this of course, just to avoid being sued (by a person who’s original idea wasn’t very original to begin with) and save a buck.

So, I’m actually proposing something that maybe disastrous, but may be the only hope. I think we as artists must openly allow theft. Not in the sense of claiming other’s art as your own, but any element one wishes to borrow, iterate on or emulate should be allowed. We’ve got to realize at the end of the day, the enormous debt we already owe to whom came before and to our contemporaries. Remember copying master works to understand how they’re done? None our ideas are original, we must now develop a collective artistic depository of ideas and spread the wealth, baby. Then and only then, we just may start making revolutionary art again.

In closing, I hope all the lawyers from my company die a painful and horrible death. It’s a fair trade for them killing art.

And steal my ideas. Underground fa life!