We had two readings for today, “On the Rights of Molotov Man” by Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas, and “Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” by Jonathan Lethem.
“Molotov Man” featured a photograph of a young man, later revealed to be a Nicaraguan rebel, winding up to throw a Molotov cocktail, with a rifle clenched in his other outstretched arm. Garnett took this and other photos of human anguish and made them the subject of paintings. Meiselas, the original Molotov photographer, eventually came calling, asking for the payment of a hefty licensing fee to represent her photographs in other media. But greater than the legal issues posed here, was the question raised by an online blogger, “Who owns the rights to this man’s struggle?” The answer, especially in today’s world of near-unlimited sharing of knowledge and experiences, seems increasingly to be: anyone to whom it speaks.
“Ecstasy of Influence” dives into the concept of plagiarism, and the notion that copying someone else’s work or ideas is inherently bad, and should avoided. Lethem argues that copying not only is perfectly fine, it is ubiquitous and unavoidable. All of our thoughts, our speech, and our actions are in some way influenced by the other people, media, and society we’ve been exposed to. If that seems too general and vague, then we can just look at the arts: particularly in writing and music, artists constantly copy, reference, and expand upon other artists’ ideas. This is how we get cultural narratives and concepts that survive the trials of time and society. While few (if any) of the ideas we see can claim to be completely original, this doesn’t take away from their artistic quality. To drive his point home, at the end of the article the author goes through his entire work section by sentence, phrase by phrase almost, and notes specifically where each concept or word came from. And that’s just the direct influences one can easily point out, not even mentioning the subtle, subliminal influences and biases we acquire over time, to the point where we don’t even notice them. Anyway, it’s an interesting inquiry into what copying is, and why it’s laughable to pretend not to be doing it all the time.