It seems that a lot of great achievements made in the text, image, and music have something to do with “plagiarism” because even some great artists say that they are actually “borrowing others work” and combine them with their own ideas. The idea of Plagiarism in post-modern times is quite common. And we can see “famous plagiarists” like Shakespeare, Helen Keller or Martin Luther King as far as I know. When we admit all kinds of language ( no matter it’s art or anything else ) we use are constantly being repeated, cycled and recycled, we tend to feel like plagiarism is not a big deal anymore.
The most paradoxical thing comes to the relationship between plagiarism and originality. When the author nowadays wants to write a book or compose a song, they want to promote their own distinctive ideas with high creativity. But at the same time, they want to give credit to previous work or their “ancestors”. It’s still hard to keep a balance between them.
But now let’s take an insight into it. What should be considered as originality? When art making is merely a process of repetition, who may probably own the originality? Or should we really care about the originality of a piece of work? Maybe we can switch our attention to the meaning of the artworks. An artist can make reference to others’ work but he or she will never get the original intention of the previous artist contained in that work. What he or she could do is to embed them with new meanings. And this might be a better attitude towards plagiarism.