NEA loses its head, but keeps its health

        Dana Gioia is going back to his poetry.

Jacobs/AP

The National Endowment for the Arts, which he led as chairman for five years, may thus go headless for a short time. But chances are, it won’t be gutted again any time soon.

The agency that Gioia took over in 2003 was an eviscerated mess. Fourteen years earlier, conservatives – famously led by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and other politicos interested in scoring points with members of their Bible-Belt base – had diverted public attention away from issues of real national importance such as  the Iran-Contra affair  and the growing national debt by staging a moral uproar over the NEA’s funding of what they deemed blasphemous and obscene art by such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

This overt and protracted challenge to the NEA’s ability to decide what art was important and excellent culminated in 1990, with the trial of the NEA Four - performance artists including Karen Finley who sued the NEA over grants for which they had been recommended by the agency’s own peer-review process, but were denied by then-NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer because of the controversial subject matter of their work. The case, National Endowment of the Arts v. Finley,  ultimately went to the Supreme Court, where artistic freedom lost in a ruling that supported Congress’s 1990 criteria that the NEA uphold ”decency and respect” in choosing art and artists to be funded.

Though the ACLU found the ruling to be “essentially meaningless,” it nonetheless resulted in the NEA getting out of the business of directly funding artists.

This was the mud- (and chocolate, if you know Karen Finley) spattered ring into which Gioia walked: in one corner,  the inflamed public, stirred up by politically powerful and self-righteous leaders making an easy moral target of art that most Americans had never even seen; and in the other, a bruised and disillusioned national arts community, their artistic honesty chilled to the bone by the NEA’s politicization by the right.

Artists had learned a hard lesson about public funding – that when public money is involved, limits on freedom of expression will be imposed. Gioia didn’t make the mistake of trying to persuade artists otherwise. Instead, the poet-businessman set about finding a role for the NEA that would still benefit the arts and artists without alarming taxpayers.

He discovered two: national promoter of arts education and supporter of state arts agencies. Gioia turned the NEA into a benign patron of public learning about nonthreatening classical art, creating touring programs and exhibitions on Shakespeare and American art treasures that no doubt seemed bland and compromised to the avant garde, but reassured citizens that an education in the arts was a good and valuable thing for their children.

By providing money to state arts agencies, Gioia safely distanced the NEA from the political dangers of directly selecting artists to fund and instead put the money into the hands of grassroots experts who could do the job more effectively because they knew best how to both honor, and gradually expand the boundaries of, taste and tolerance in their immediate communities.

It took wisdom, patience and subtle creativity to rebuild the NEA in an image that is both pleasing to the average American and quietly supportive of the nation’s artistic frontiers. Gioia did a good job. Because of him, the NEA has regained its health and may be able to serve the arts, artists and the country in more adventurous ways over the next four years. May he write in peace for many years.

Dancing on the (cutting) edge

The future of dance showed up at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

But not on a track, diving platform or gym floor. It appeared in a bird’s nest – Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium, where the Games were opened last Aug. 8 with a monumental, dreamlike vision made up of moving bodies, a vision that awed the world. It was choreographed and designed by Shen Wei. 

It’s talent like Shen Wei’s that Charles Reinhart  sees as the next step in dance’s creative development. Reinhart, longtime director of the American Dance Festival at Duke University in Durham, N.C., believes individual genius is more important than experiments with style and approach in the progress of art. 

Charles Reinhart

In fact, Reinhart thinks dance is having a sort of success problem: The art form has expanded so rapidly, with new talent popping up in so many new places around the world, that’s it’s hard to keep up with. 

And it’s the talent itself that will take dance to its next level, he said. “Once you’ve found the talent, you back it, no matter what direction it’s taking.” 

 That includes Shen Wei. As head of the ADF, it’s Reinhart’s mission to discover and nurture new individual artists and companies and explore fresh dimensions of dance. In addition to the annual festival at Duke - a six-week  intensive school, dance laboratory and showcase for noted and emerging companies and choreographers – ADF leads projects in other nations. In 1987, the ADF went to Guangzhou, China, to teach local students, some of whom went on to create China’s first modern-dance company. Shen Wei was one of them.

When the young choreographer immigrated to the U.S. in 1995 to study at the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab, the ADF invited Shen Wei into its International Choreographers Commissioning Program. Five years later, at the 2000 festival, he founded his current company, Shen Wei Dance Arts.  

2008 American Dance Festival/Sara D. Davis. "Connect Transfer" by Shen Wei

Even as one of Reinhart’s two-per-decade stars of choreography, Shen Wei is unusual, the director said. “Each of his pieces has been dramatically different” from all the others, with no recurring themes or stylistic motifs.

“It might be humanly impossible to keep going on that way,” said Reinhart with a laugh.

But if Shen Wei’s works themselves have no unifying theme, his highly theatrical vision suggests one: Reinhart sees the melding of theater and dance movement and also the closer coming-together of ballet and modern styles as two trends shaping the dance frontier.  

The 2009 festival will look into that rapprochement of  styles, with ballet companies performing modern choreography and panels scheduled to explore the ramifications of the blend. For 2010, Reinhart said, “one of the ideas we’re thinking about … is to look at where theater and dance come together.”

That combination isn’t new – many contemporary dance companies stress the theatrical side of their art by adding “dance theater” to their names and creating choreography with a visual narrative to it. Reinhart particularly cited the work of Twyla Tharp, who has worked directly with theater artists such as director Andre Gregory and who choreographed the dialogue-free Broadway musical based on Billy Joel’s pop songs, “Movin’ Out.” Reinhart especially liked that – “The story is so clear through the movement,” he noted.

But even though they’re not revolutionary, Reinhart thinks such combinations are more frequent than they used to be, as if old barriers are falling for good. It’s like what’s happening between the ballet and modern camps, he said. When he started in dance, people assumed that a dancer trained in one technique could not perform the other.

Now, ”the whole educational system has changed,” he said, “so they’re much more versatile.”   

Pulling down the barriers lets dancers and choreographers be more creative, too. 

 ”We’re talking about a [dance] world where the wars have kind of dissipated,” Reinhart said. “I think that’s healthy.”                          

Video: Shen Wei in residence at Duke University, January 2009

We’ll be singing when we’re winning

Tough day?

You’re not alone. For pretty much everyone in the world, each tick of the clock brings out something new, grim and scary from the great big Barney bag of economic death: giant menacing bills, wraithlike sales, blood-red ink, poisonous layoffs, magic disappearing credit lines, shriveled hopes.

We need some cheering up. Time to mess with our brain chemicals.

First, read this: Don’t panic. It applies to everyone, not just business people.

Second, read this: Support for creativity. It bodes well for everyone, not just artists. (And it made me smile a lot because Geniocity had this news about the Americans for the Arts recommendations before the Times.) 

And third: Click on this play button and turn it up really really loud. Move around. Sing. Endorphins are good for everyone.

And so is irony. So don’t just keep getting up. That’s for suckers. Change things so you don’t get knocked down again.

We’ve already changed who’s in charge, haven’t we?

Now – don’t you feel better?

Nature or nurture? Whatever causes creativity, keep it coming

Though a lot of people who never thought much about it before have begun realizing that creativity is essential to every kind of human success – including the money part that Americans value so much – nobody has a real grasp yet on where creativity comes from.

All over the nation, government leaders, business people and school adminstrators have been moved by their desire to develop a smarter, more capable work force and boost economies. They’ve gotten behind efforts to promote imaginative thinking, seek out and fund innovators and involve artists in teaching and neighborhood redevelopment projects.

They see a use for creativity the way early humans saw a use for fire, without understanding what it is. 

But that’s not their fault, because not even scientists are sure yet. Some, such as V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California-San Diego, have postulated that creativity began 20,000-30,000 years ago when neurological structures in the brain finally developed enough to make physical contact with each other, suddenly allowing humans to, in effect, cross-reference their thoughts. Humans could then compare one experience or perception to another and discover likenesses or patterns that helped them understand what they saw more deeply. Using real experiences as a starting point, they could imagine experiences that weren’t real. They could recognize that one thing – an object or image – might represent another quite different thing – an idea. 

 Source credit: www.mindpowerzone.com/article1.htm

They were no longer limited to the literal – they understood metaphor. And so, quite abruptly by evolutionary standards, humans developed religion and art.

But postulating that creativity was the result of brain development is not the same as knowing exactly what the development was and how it works. The scientific theories seem contradictory, to say the least, with some camps scoffing at common lore such as the idea that creative people are right-brained, while others find evidence that seems to support it.

For instance, here’s a story about a study of schizotypy from about three years ago. People with schizotypal personalities – such as Albert Einstein and Emily Dickinson – are somewhat like schizophrenics in their oddities of perceiving, thinking and communicating, but not actually schizophrenic. They also tend to be highly creative. In the study, though all participants showed activity in both brain lobes while creatively engaged, the schizotypes showed much more intense right-brain activity when performing a creative task than both normal people and schizophrenics.

“In the scientific community, the popular idea that creativity exists in the right side of the brain is thought to be ridiculous, because you need both hemispheres of your brain to make novel associations and to perform other creative tasks,” Brad Folley, a Vanderbilt University psychologist who took part in the study, said in a news release. “We found that all three groups, schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal controls, did use both hemispheres when performing creative tasks. But the brain scans of the schizotypes showed a hugely increased activation of the right hemisphere compared to the schizophrenics and the normal controls.”

Interesting. Yet, just today, Peter Chaban , a teacher-researcher at the Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto, called the idea of right-brain specialization one of the “widely held misconceptions” and ”outdated myths” about creativity.

Chaban does credit cognition in both halves of the brain with some responsibility for creativity, but he gives equal weight to personality and environment – nature and nurture – as well. In his blog, he mildly takes issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s buzzed-about new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, in which Gladwell tries to make the case that creativity is more the result of environmental influences and constant practice than the luck of the wiring in a person’s head. Chaban agrees that external factors have an effect on creative ability. But he asserts that, together, cognition (how your brain functions), personality (high motivation) and environment (outside encouragement) form the three-legged stool on which creativity stands and that without any one of those legs, a person’s creativity will not flourish.   

I’m inclined to suppose that personality is directly related to cognition and that it also affects environment (if you’re disagreeable, are people apt to support and encourage you?), but that’s a topic for someone with actual psychological and sociological chops to pursue. 

What I can say with some authority is that creative people care a great deal less about the cognition and personality sides of it than about the environment. They want and need support and encouragement. So whether or not science catches up to the current economic and educational fascination with the benefits of creativity and proves either that all of us can be extremely creative or that only a few special people can, the ones who are talented right now are just fine with the increasing appreciation and resources they’re getting.

Recreating what can’t be fixed

Despite the hours of contemplation bestowed on me all last week while I waited for the next available tech-support person to answer, it didn’t occur to me until just now that my ordeal makes a good metaphor for the situation confronting our nation.

For eight years, Americans have been on hold, unable to reach help or take action themselves as our international reputation, environment, economy, educational system and Constitutional freedoms have been destroyed or defiled. And now that our new Tech-Supporter-in-Chief is finally on the job and trying to set things right, we’re beginning to realize that some of what was damaged may never be fully restored.

So, as I had to do with a couple of my blog posts, we Americans are going to have to reinvent what we’ve lost. If we’re smart and creative about it, we’ll end up with better stuff that we started with.

Education in the U.S. has been going downhill for decades and needs to be completely reimagined, starting with the 19th-century industrial assembly line it’s modeled on. Saving the life of our planet will require every brain cell we have just to bring the Earth back to the compromised state of health it was in 20 years ago. But if we choose the right new strategies and practices and stick to them, our children’s children may learn more effectively and have a cleaner, cooler world to live in. 

Obama has already begun to change how other nations view us, just by getting elected. But he’ll need our encouragement and ideas and, most of all, our willingness to change our behavior if the U.S. is to become, for the first time, a leader that other nations can trust to live up to our own stated standards, heed international law and work for the common good. Being truly responsible and fair - that’s going to take a serious self-makeover.

We’re going to have to realize that our livelihoods and our futures depend on the U.S. being a good global citizen and a center for creativity. 

Or else. Because we have met our tech support – and it is us.

Time to hang up that phone

 and take action!

Cleveland and artists are each other’s future

While our new President Obama settles into Washington and starts getting down to the business of reforming U.S. policy and rehabilitating our character and economy, the creative work of decades continues in other, less glamorous parts of the nation where recession has intensified the need for positive change.

Cleveland is one of these, a Rust Belt city like so many others whose collapsed industries, growing joblessness, crumbling infrastructure and impoverished populations have begun to look from afar like signs of imminent doom. With all its decay, though, Cleveland has at least one increasingly solid section - a part of its foundation that, if further reinforced and imaginatively built upon, could provide the basis for a lasting transformation of the whole metropolitan structure.

And that solid section is its arts community.

Many other mid-sized American cities have remarkable artistic and cultural resources, thanks to the generations of the 19th and early 20th centuries who translated their love of the arts and their sense of civic duty into organizations and buildings that have grown into great institutions.

But the potential of Cleveland’s arts community to revitalize the entire city comes from something more than its renowned cultural treasures alone. It comes from a handful of people in that community who’ve had the brains and determination to create a kind of paradise for the artists who live and work in the city and in surrounding Cuyahoga County.

No, it doesn’t look like a paradise, unless your concept includes a lot of aging concrete. But what artists have in Cleveland is an astonishing amount of what they need – and that includes the abandoned buildings.

The resources are many and unique. The latest one, announced just days ago, is a set of one-year fellowships for 40 individual Cuyahoga County artists in visual, literary and performing disciplines. The amounts? They’ll be $20,000 each, far more than most individual-artist awards in such cities as Rochester, Pittsburgh and even Seattle.

Called Creative Workforce Fellowships, they’ll be administered by the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, the Cleveland advocacy, research and service organization that has helped bring about nearly all of the arts-and-culture support system created in the last 11 years.

In that time, with CPAC leading the way, city council members have instituted a live-work ordinance allowing artists to create combined home and studio spaces in the area’s many unused industrial buildings, and a percent-for-art rule that requires city building projects to budget money for commissioned art and design work. With the Council of Smaller Enterprises, CPAC has created the COSE Arts Network, a special membership program for artists and arts-based businesses that provides educational events, mentoring, reduced-cost services and benefits such as health insurance; and established the Artist as Entrepreneur Institute. a quarterly instruction course in best business practices for artists.

Cleveland has also gained an Arts Education Consortium that works to provide teacher training and arts experiences and instruction for young people, including enrichment programs that employ many local artists as in-school instructors. The city also has increasing numbers of developers and community organizations creating arts districts and dedicated artist housing in neighborhoods throughout the city, with the potential for much more as civic leaders consider what to do with Cleveland’s many foreclosed homes.

And, most impressive of all, the county has created Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, an arts-tax district with nearly $20 million per year to disburse in operating-support and special-project grants for arts and culture organizations, thanks to a cigarette-tax increase approved by voters in 2006. It’s a grant from CAC to CPAC that has made the new individual-artist fellowship program possible.

So what can artists find in this struggling old post-industrial burg? Money. Cheap and plentiful space. A low cost of living. Helpful advocates. Business guidance and resources. Access to reduced-cost insurance. Employment possibilities. Welcoming neighborhoods. And an enormous range of art, cultural activities and organizations.

It’s taken Cleveland more than a century, plus 11 extra-intensive years to build all that. For the city, it’s the bedrock of the future.

But for artists, it’s paradise. And as more artists discover it, it will start to look like one.

Photo of Scott Radke’s mural at Cleveland’s Fairfield Food Market found on Wacky Doodler’s Photostream

Americans for the Arts working with Obama team on policy

Not just a place at the table, but an office in the halls of power.

Robert Lynch envisions this for the arts. For months, he has worked with Barack Obama’s transition team to pinpoint the ways in which arts and culture can help and be helped in the new president’s plan to rescue the economy.

He thinks change is coming.

 “I feel like we’ll be listened to, and we’re not going away,” said Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, a research and advocacy organization. “I’m very pleased with the access we’re getting. It gives me optimism.”  

Not groundbreaking, but “groundsaving” is how Lynch described the recommendations that he and his organization have made to the Obama team – a set of practical tactics that would stabilize and strengthen the arts and cultural sector while drawing on artists’ expertise to improve education and community life around the nation.

The nine recommendations aim to: provide community teaching and mentoring jobs for artists, as well as arts-job training, affordable health care and unemployment insurance; increase development grants for neighborhood cultural projects, art districts and cultural facilities; boost funding for federal cultural agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts that support local arts agencies and their grants and services for local artists; and encourage state transportation departments to work with state arts agencies on providing more artist commissions for creative design, public artworks and historic preservation-projects in transportation infrastructure.

The point of increasing government funding for arts and culture is not to make the sector more dependent on federal money, Lynch said, but to give it an important tool: the lever of official approval. Being deemed worthy of a grant by the government helps artists and cultural groups persuade audiences and private donors to support them, too.  

That’s not a new idea, but the last recommendation comes close. It calls for the creation of a senior-level post in the Obama administration for an arts official, someone who would coordinate arts and cultural policies and guide arts-related initiatives stemming from federal agencies that deal with such issues as tourism, education, economic development, cultural exchange, intellectual property and broadband access.

To have for the first time a senior policy person in the White House “who can connect the dots … and truly represent the breadth and strength of the arts that is already there,” would be pretty close to groundbreaking, Lynch said.

Though he’s most concerned right now with restoring arts and culture to better health, Lynch does have an eye on the arts frontier. He sees new and creative ways for nonprofits to sustain themselves by being more entrepreneurial and blending their nonprofit mission with for-profit activities, as the Metropolitan Opera has by video-recording its performances to screen for paying audiences in local movie theaters.

He also sees an “explosion” of artworks that will take advantage of new technologies, and the development of new art forms based in folk culture and crafts that will increase the public’s consumption of art.

“I think that’s going to be what really helps the arts through this economic downturn,” Lynch said.

But a sympathetic president can’t hurt. Said Lynch of the transition team, “I’ve really been impressed with their receptiveness.” 

Technology Hell

I want to extend my apologies to all readers of our Geniocity.com blogs for the technological problems the site has been suffering since the beginning of the week. We have been trying to get everything back the way it was and have mostly succeeded, but one or two glitches remain.

For that reason, I have to beg the pardon of everyone who has come to Creative Nerve looking for my posts about Americans for the Arts’ efforts to develop a national arts policy with Barack Obama’s transition team and about Cleveland’s groundbreaking support system for arts, culture and the economic development they can generate.

With luck, these posts will be back in place soon. So please keep checking out Geniocity.com every business day for our fresh perspectives on the creative cutting edges of arts and culture, entrepreneurship, business practices and law and government. And don’t miss the terrific – and affordable – original artwork in The Geniocity Shop. 

A professor of mine once told me that his idea of hell was a Laundromat. I’d have to say mine is trying to communicate with tech support. What’s yours?

I think this guy answered my call for help ….

Darwinism in arts and business

A story in the Akron Beacon Journal yesterday (which I found through a Crain’s Cleveland Business Morning Roundup e-mail), brought back to mind an arts-business issue that needs to be looked at squarely and often, but seldom is. It’s literally an issue of life or death. 

In the wake of the Carousel Dinner Theatre’s abrupt closing, reporter Kim Hone-McMahan talked to other Akron-area arts organizations about the drying up of their already-too-scarce financial resources. She quoted Mitchell Kahan, director and CEO of the Akron Art Museum, as noting that arts organizations in general are chronically undercapitalized.

That’s a comment I’ve heard other arts leaders make over the years and there’s no doubt that it’s true. Artists are known for struggling on with little more to work with than a bare room and their own ideas. It takes an almost miraculous simultaneity of luck and relentless, bruising effort for any individual artist or cultural group to be able to build a lasting business, whether for-profit or nonprofit.

Thousands of dedicated people all over the nation spend their lives trying to create or find dependable sources of money for the arts. And the fact is that, like any industry, the arts succeed or fail largely according to their artistic quality, business savvy and adaptibility to changing market conditions. But the assumption behind nonprofit arts, at least, has always been that their unique works and perspectives, including the cultural, intellectual and educational value of what they have to offer the community, should guarantee their survival even when they can’t support themselves.

The question this begs is: Does it endanger the whole herd to keep the weak ones alive?

In nature, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it’s the fittest – those with genetic advantages allowing them to reach food, procreate successfully and avoid being killed – who survive. Same thing in for-profit business, where everyone accepts that the market will kill off the companies that can’t compete.

But in the artistic world, which remains overwhelmingly nonprofit, it’s usual for companies not to be able to support themselves on their earnings alone. They constantly have to seek donations and grants to make up the difference – like deer who can’t get through the winter without food provided by animal lovers.

Deer fed by humans can live and continue to reproduce. Pretty soon, though, there are a lot of deer needing to share the food, not all of them strong or well-adapted to surviving the winter. Eventually, it becomes obvious that the animal lovers can’t provide enough nourishment to go around.

This is the point at which some communities hire sharpshooters to kill off a certain percentage of deer.  Many of us abhor this practice, but the only other choice is to limit the number of deer being born in the first place – which means not feeding the deer in the winter.

Either way, some deer are likely to perish.

If those of us who love the arts assume that growing numbers of arts and culture organizations are a good thing for a community – and we usually do – we’re going to have to confront this deer dilemma. And now would probably be a good time, because the deer chow we have left to give the herd isn’t going to last  through this bleak economic season. Some of our deer ones have already succumbed.

Should communities and private donors refuse to provide funding to new ventures that don’t partner and share services with other ventures, old or new? Should funders give only on condition that nonprofit arts groups develop lines of commercial products to sell in addition to their ars pro artis creations?  

Should we just assume, like the regular business world, that we’re better off losing the ones that die? Or should we keep dividing the sustenance we have into smaller and smaller portions, knowing that the whole arts population will weaken, maybe fatally? 

In the coming months, the new Obama administration may well pursue policies that affect arts group’s sustainability. Which direction do we want the future to go?

A quick archaeological dig reveals the creative truth

I was blown away when I first saw Corey Vidal’s “Star Wars” tribute video a couple of days ago. What impressed me so much was not just how funny and clever a video it was – a sort of “Forbidden Broadway“-style parody for the sci-fi movie crowd - but how much skill it seemed to have taken for this one guy to have composed the words and the music and then sung all the parts himself, especially because he appeared to have about a five-octave range.

I mean, take a look at this thing:

I should have wondered a little harder about that basso-to-first-tenor tessitura because, on checking around You Tube to learn more about this musical prodigy, I discovered that Vidal didn’t write or sing the piece at all. Instead, he acted and lip-synced to an existing song by the musical-comedy group Moosebutter.

A couple of additional mouse clicks revealed a video that Moosebutter itself had made in response to Vidal’s:

And it’s even funnier than the first one, right? By this time, what I had begun to wonder was how big and messy a lawsuit this situation was going to spawn, because Vidal’s video had become a nominee for a 35th Annual People’s Choice Award. So I went looking for Moosebutter’s web site and found the following:

FAQ About Star Wars – there’s a lot of confusion about the origin of the Star Wars song, since many people are attributing it solely to Corey Vidal. Here is information to clear up the misinformation, which we have little hope that the people who need it will read it.

  Music is from 6 different not-Star Wars movies, all written by John Williams.

• Words are paraphrased or directly from the original Star Wars trilogy, by George Lucas, et al.
• Song was arranged spring 1999 by Josh Slagowski and Bryant Smith, original members of moosebutter, in Salt Lake City, UT. Parts were re-arranged later by Mister Tim (Tim Y. Jones)
• Song was recorded in 2000 by Josh, Bryant, and Tim, and re-recorded in 2002 by Tim, Chris, Glen, and Weston, the new cast of moosebutter.
• There have been almost 50 different cast members of moosebutter since 1999, including subs and special guests. About half of those have sung Star Wars.
• Corey Vidal contacted us in summer 2008 to ask permission to produce his video. We said yes.
• WHAM BAM internet explosion.
• Corey is lip-synching to the 2002 studio recording of moosebutter. It was recorded at June Audio, Provo, UT. Corey filmed his video in his kitchen.
• moosebutter filmed their response video in November 2008. Corey was the most vocal supporter of us producing the new video, and he graciously posted it to his popular YouTube channel to generate more views.
• At the time of posting, Corey’s video has more than 3.2 million more views than moosebutter’s. That’s because Corey is cuter, and smells better.

So nobody’s suing anybody, apparently. Which is amazing and great, because this is how creativity is supposed to happen: Someone gets an idea from someone else’s picture or play or song or book and does his or her own take on it, using it in degrees that range from subliminal inspiration to big recognizable chunks embellished or twisted or inverted in some way.

And no person gets bent out of shape about it, including the “original” artist. I use quotation marks in deference to my fellow Geniocity blogger, Peter Friedman (see his Colbert-themed blogs for Jan. 13 and 14), who frequently writes about how pointless many copyright-infringement suits are because every creative person borrows in some way from those who came before. 

It’s true in this case, too - the Moosebutter guys of course boosted the “Star Wars” lines from George Lucas and the music from John Williams (neither of whom evidently raised a fuss); both Lucas and Williams famously reference earlier works in their own, including Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series, the operas (and leitmotivs) of Richard Wagner and scads of others. And those guys borrowed from earlier guys ad infinitum.         

You can’t stop creative people from being influenced by each other’s inventions and turning them into something of their own, because that’s what creativity is, whether it’s artistic, entrepreneurial or scientific. Talented actor-videographer Corey Vidal did this the right way, by asking permission first and giving credit afterward; talented musician-parodists Moosebutter did it the right way by graciously giving permission first and humorously one-upping Vidal afterward. Turns out both Vidal and Moosebutter were nominated for that People’s Choice Award.

Score: Lawrence Lessig , Peter Friedman and artists, 3; Stephen Colbert, a goose egg as big as his mouth