To look at Picasso’s drawings is to better understand his paintings as something greater than Picasso, an artistic vision based on imitation and purloined art. If we look beyond the artist, we might actually see his art and access his creative process without the shadow and burden of Picasso’s name getting in the way. We might call what Picasso created “invention” or “reinvention,” but it is hard to look at these drawings and not have a sense that so much of what we call originality relies on a good deal of imitation and even a bit of theft.

Here is This is What it Became, one cut from ThruYOU:

Mike Masnick of techdirt, writes yesterday, in terms that a lawyer for Gregg Gillis would love:

[T]o hear some people talk about these things, none of this is “creative.” It’s all just “copying.” In some cases it’s outright “piracy.” After all, Kutiman is using the works of others, and doing so entirely without permission. And yet, I have trouble seeing how anyone can legitimately claim that these songs are “piracy” in any real sense of the word. Kutiman is clearly a musician. That he uses a note played by someone else on a YouTube video, and then “plays” it himself, strikes me as no different than playing a keyboard that plays a recorded sounded, or even strumming a guitar. A musician is putting different sounds together to create music. Does it really make a huge difference if that music involves someone making a note from an instrument directly themselves… or by taking the note originally played by someone else and doing something creative and amazing with it?

I think Masnick is right on in stating that the use of technology widely available only in the last several years to compose a work from pieces of other recorded work is “no different than playing a keyboard that plays a recorded sounded, or even strumming a guitar.” What many fail to recognize is that the music the likes of Kutiman, Gillis, DJ Earworm and a myriad of others are producing today is the result of new technology, not a new mindset. There are plenty of people out there who would tell you that rampant sampling is the consequence of a generation without respect for property rights. But I think people who say such things are missing the real point: ten years ago, it would have been very difficult for people like Gillis and Kutiman to compose the work they compose today. Twenty years ago it would have been impossible without efforts few but the most dedicated would resort to.

In short, we have new instruments today. That those instruments produce their sounds by means of reproducing pre-recorded sounds does not make them any less instruments than instruments that can produce only a limited number of notes.

From The Millions: “’Substantially Similar? (after Koons 2010),’ [right] is composed of 36 rectangular panels, each contributed by a different artist and then assembled by the artist who conceived the piece, Alfred Steiner. The result was an instantly recognizable riff on Jeff Koons’s ‘Popeye’ series [left] – an appropriation from an appropriator who has made headlines in several highly publicized copyright cases. A note beside ‘Substantially Similar?’ left no doubt about its creator’s stance on the passionate arguments for and against copyright laws: ‘By engaging these issues, the project may also suggest how copyright antagonizes artistic freedom while providing artists no discernible benefit.’”

Steiner is a “lawyer who happens to be an artist.” Steiner described his methods in composing Substantially Similar? (after Koons 2010):

I took an electronic version of the Koons original and divided it up into 36 pieces and sent each artist just one little piece, via e-mail, so they wouldn’t recognize the whole thing. I gave them instructions on how to create an image based on the image that I’d e-mailed them. The only other instructions were a very close paraphrase of the 2nd Circuit’s test for copyright infringement – which is, “would a reasonable person regard the two works’ esthetic impact as the same?”

TM: In other words, would a layman recognize these two works as being the same thing?

AS: Right.

TM: So the contributors didn’t know what they were reproducing?

AS: Right.

TM: And the result was a piece that looked vaguely like Koons, but was different.

AS: It had the essence of the original but was clearly a new work.

In connection with Girl Talk, Steiner states what is very much my thinking — why would we want to stop something so good?

[Greg Gillis] will make songs that are totally based on samples. One song may have 200 samples, so many that there’s no way you could pay each artist. He’s very well received critically. The question is, should it be possible to make that kind of work or not? I kind of think, yes, it should be possible.

I should say, also, that with the whole idea of a divided city there are analogies in the real world, as well as precursors within fantastic fiction. C. J. Cherryh wrote a book that had a divided city like that, in some ways, as did Jack Vance. Now I didn’t know this at the time, but I’m also not getting my knickers in a twist about it. If you think what you’re trying to do is come up with a really original idea—one that absolutely no one has ever had before—you’re just kidding yourself.

You’re inevitably going to tread the ground that the greats have trodden before, and that’s fine. It simply depends on what you’re able to do with it.

That indeed is where artistic genius resides — not in the originality of the thought, but in what the artist does with the thought.