The principle of collage is the central principle of all art.

No one who has spent more than a few days reading this blog in its 3+ years can have missed the fact that I have been strongly persuaded that the common notion of authorship — that true artists are solitary originating geniuses — is a myth. Kenneth Smith, in “It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing,’” adresses the same issues and covers much of the same ground, but he brings up a a few very interesting things that I had not previously encountered. The first is the prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff’s use of the term “unoriginal genius” to describe someone with skill at making his or her way through the contemporary flood of “information.”  A “genius” in this sense is not someone who — as convention has it — comes up with a creation that no one has ever dreamt of before, but, rather, someone with an extraordinary ability to manage available information, parse it, organize it, and distribute it. Perloff believes that in the end it is this type of genius, not the mythical conventional sort, that distinguishes your writing from mine:

Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one’s mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, “moving information,” to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today’s writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.

Perloff’s notion of unoriginal genius should not be seen merely as a theoretical conceit but rather as a realized writing practice, one that dates back to the early part of the 20th century, embodying an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text is as important as what the text says or does. Think, for example, of the collated, note-taking practice of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project or the mathematically driven constraint-based works by Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians. (hyperlinks added)

Even more interesting, however, is what Smith did. He’s taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania he calls “Uncreative Writing.”

In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.

We retype documents and transcribe audio clips. We make small changes to Wikipedia pages (changing an “a” to “an” or inserting an extra space between words). We hold classes in chat rooms, and entire semesters are spent exclusively in Second Life. Each semester, for their final paper, I have them purchase a term paper from an online paper mill and sign their name to it, surely the most forbidden action in all of academia. Students then must get up and present the paper to the class as if they wrote it themselves, defending it from attacks by the other students. What paper did they choose? Is it possible to defend something you didn’t write? Something, perhaps, you don’t agree with? Convince us.

All this, of course, is technology-driven. When the students arrive in class, they are told that they must have their laptops open and connected. And so we have a glimpse into the future. And after seeing what the spectacular results of this are, how completely engaged and democratic the classroom is, I am more convinced that I can never go back to a traditional classroom pedagogy. I learn more from the students than they can ever learn from me. The role of the professor now is part party host, part traffic cop, full-time enabler.

The secret: the suppression of self-expression is impossible. Even when we do something as seemingly “uncreative” as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways. The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother’s cancer operation. It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices.

After a semester of my forcibly suppressing a student’s “creativity” by making her plagiarize and transcribe, she will tell me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being “creative,” she had produced the most creative body of work in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity—the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training—she had emerged renewed and rejuvenated, on fire and in love again with writing.

Smith has thus provided another instance of what I already know in a different context — there are more and less original legal writers even though legal writing is one vast collaborative writing enterprise consisting primarily of texts cobbled together from pieces of other legal texts.

Finally, Smith suggests that the insights he provides (which he would no more claim are original to him than I would claim them mine) have been largely resisted in one profoundly important world of writing: literature:

I’m sensing that literature—infinite in its potential of ranges and expressions—is in a rut, tending to hit the same note again and again, confining itself to the narrowest of spectrums, resulting in a practice that has fallen out of step and is unable to take part in arguably the most vital and exciting cultural discourses of our time. I find this to be a profoundly sad moment—and a great lost opportunity for literary creativity to revitalize itself in ways it hasn’t imagined.

Perhaps one reason writing is stuck might be the way creative writing is taught. In regard to the many sophisticated ideas concerning media, identity, and sampling developed over the past century, books about how to be a creative writer have relied on clichéd notions of what it means to be “creative.” These books are peppered with advice like: “A creative writer is an explorer, a groundbreaker. Creative writing allows you to chart your own course and boldly go where no one has gone before.” Or, ignoring giants like de Certeau, Cage, and Warhol, they suggest that “creative writing is liberation from the constraints of everyday life.”

As John Pareles wrote in “Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?”, Bob Dylan is another one of those giants leading the way:

The absolutely original artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature, living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or traditions have left any impression. Like virtually every artist, Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He’s reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending they don’t exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and extension, emulation and mockery — that’s how individual artists and the arts themselves evolve. It’s a process that is neatly summed up in Mr. Dylan’s album title ” ‘Love and Theft,’ ” which itself is a quotation from a book on minstrelsy by Eric Lott.

Of course, literature has not completely ignored these artistic trends. The group of authors comprising Oulipo were exemplars of what Smith might call “writers as programmers,” and Donald Barthelme wrote:

The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the Twentieth Century.

And, believe me: if you’ve never read Georges Perec or Barthelme, you’ve never read anything like what they’ve written. Or maybe you have.

Living the life of an artist or stealing? Coldplay faces the question once again

The Chicago Tribune reports: “A day after hauling in seven Grammy nominations, the members of Coldplay should’ve been celebrating. Instead they were served with a copyright infringement lawsuit Thursday that claims they ripped off guitarist Joe Satriani to write one of their biggest hits, ‘Viva La Vida.’”

And a comparison of the songs sure makes Satriani’s allegations credible:

There must be something about that song.  A band called Creaky Boards earlier this year accused Coldplay of stealing Viva La Vida from them:

As TechDirt subsequently reported, however, the leader of Creaky Boards later “not only retracted his accusation, but suggested that perhaps both bands were actually “inspired” by the “Fairy Theme” in the Legend of Zelda.”  TechDirt also made this, very important point:

. . . The thing is, part of the point we keep trying to make around here is that, for the most part, that’s true of just about everyone. It’s the overly aggressive use of copyright law that prevents that sort of “goodness” from showing up. Oh, and it’s also worth mentioning, that this little story has definitely increased the profile of The Creaky Boards — proving one of the points we recently made about plagiarism. Even if the plagiarist is “bigger” than you, the original creator can use that to their advantage aswell.

Plagiarism, even “unconsciously” done, has gotten musicians in trouble. In Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton, a federal court of appeals upheld a jury award of $5.4 million against Michael Bolton and Sony (the record company associated with him) for “unconsciously” plagiarizing the Isley Brothers’ “Love is a Wonderful Thing.” As noted by the Columbia Law Library Music Plagiarism Project, the case is comparable to Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, in which the court held that in his hit song “My Sweet Lord” George Harrison had “unconsciously misappropriated the musical essence of ‘He’s So Fine.’”

The decision against George Harrison has been heavily criticized.  It is important to note, though, that “plagiarism” involves issues entirely different than the ones (contentious themselves) involving sampling. Most importantly, it involves drawing those impossible lines between artistic influence, legitimate appropriation, and acts that are considered the equivalent of theft. Bob Dylan is without question one of the most important artists of our time, but, as John Pareles has written in “Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?”

The absolutely original artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature, living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or traditions have left any impression. Like virtually every artist, Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He’s reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending they don’t exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and extension, emulation and mockery – that’s how individual artists and the arts themselves evolve. It’s a process that is neatly summed up in Mr. Dylan’s album title ” `Love and Theft,’ ” which itself is a quotation from a book on minstrelsy by Eric Lott.

Hip-hop, ever in the vanguard, ran into problems in the mid-1980′s when the technique of sampling – copying and adapting a riff, a beat and sometimes a hook or a whole chorus to build a new track – was challenged by copyright holders demanding payment even for snippets. Although sampling was just a technological extension of the age-old process of learning through imitation, producers who use samples now pay up instead of trying to set precedents for fair use.

Check out the following.  Led Zeppelin was covering Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, but Dylan claims the authorship of and the copyright in his song.  Of course, the copyright in the first song had expired, so Dylan’s song is not an legally infringes nothing:

I have made it a point on this blog to point out that historically many “Writers, like other artisans, considered their task to lie in the reworking of traditional materials according to principles and techniques preserved and handed down to them in rhetoric and poetics – the collective wisdom of their craft.”  In short, there is nothing unusual about Dylan’s compositional methods.  That’s not to say that Coldplay isn’t in legal trouble as a result of Satriani’s lawsuit.  It’s to say that we’re in a cultural moment in which people are ready to find theft and “plagiarism” where there may not be any.  Is Coldplay making money that really belongs to Satriani?  Would Satriani’s song have gotten a greater audience had Coldplay’s never been released?

ADDENDUM, from Wired:

Joe Satriani accused Coldplay of plagiarism for lifting elements of his song “If I Could Fly” for its hit song “Viva La Vida” earlier this year.

Now, videos depicting  similarities between the songs are disappearing from YouTube courtesy of Coldplay’s label, EMI, which claims the videos infringe on its copyright. We found one that’s still online, which you can view to the right, for the time being.

You can still hear the Coldplay song elsewhere on YouTube, including in user-generated videos, so it seems likely that EMI is removing the comparison videos due to embarrassment on the part of Coldplay and/or legal ramifications for the ongoing Satriani suit, as Music Industry Blog posits. One imagines that a judge or jury would merely need to see one of these videos to conclude that there’s a striking similarity between the songs… probably too striking.

It’s conceivable that the Chris Martin lifted the beat, chords and melody from Satriani subconsciously. It’s not uncommon for musicians to hear something and regurgitate it later without realizing it. Coldplay has been accused of stealing someone’s music before — for the same song, no less. And another YouTube video has cast doubt on these claims by showing that all three bands could owe a debt to some guy called Günther.

We’re not so interested in the spat between Satriani and Martin; plagiarism accusations abound in the music world. What’s interesting here is that EMI appears to be using copyright as a way to remove one version of a Coldplay song while allowing other versions to remain online. It’s a useful reminder of the ways in which copyright law can be used for purposes other than thwarting the infringement of copyright. In this case, it’s a somewhat useful tool for downplaying plagiarism accusations directed at one of the world’s top acts.

Many labels have deals with YouTube that allow their works to appear in user-generated videos, because doing so can net them more of YouTube’s ad revenue (artists and labels sometimes can get paid when someone synchs their music to user-created video on YouTube). Apparently, these deals involve the ability to pull certain objectionable usages for reasons other than copyright, although the message that appears on YouTube — “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by EMI Music” — appears a bit disingenuous. If copyright were the issue, a YouTube search for “coldplay viva la vida” wouldn’t return 32,700 results.