The Ideal In The Derivative

One of my rules of creativity is that an artwork should be "unique", that is not based on previous artworks but a new and fundamental truth instead.

The first reason for this is out of courtesy and self-respect. If an artist is anything he or she should be imaginative, and it's a personal admittance of failure to be so lacking imagination that an artwork should based on someone else's idea.

A second reason for this rule is a belief in a higher idealism, that some pure thing, idea or "shape" is being translated by the artist to the viewer and that this translation is always imperfect. To translate from an already imperfect translation, could never come closer to the ideal than the original artwork.

However, all good rules can be broken at certain times. So here is why those two reasons are bogus, and why an artwork can justifiably be based on another artwork.

To address the first point; all imagination is based on experience. The brain accepts inputs, processes, then outputs. The outputs can be actions or internalisations. Internalisations are very like actions. It has been shown that athletes that imagine training train at least fifty percent as well as athletes who perform actual training. If this model is correct then the quantity of ideas is based on the variety of input and the processing power. Thus an artist who has seen ten images will have fewer ideas than an artist who has seen one thousand images, assuming identical processing power. In the modern world most creative images are not paintings; whether advertisements, films, television programmes, computer games, etcetera. All images ever seen together constitute inputs and every output will be a processed mix of that which is input. The output itself can be an input. Such use of the brain is called "musing"!

There is undoubtedly some part of the brain that can create images, a blind man gaining sight for the first time might be able to paint, but perhaps that person would only recognise and like the result if it tallys in some way with images experienced since seeing. With no experience of images, the result of a totally blind painter would be equally meaningful and meaningless; no more useful or interesting than a brain scan.

Imagination is often processing based, which at least involves sufficient visual memory to process and hold images and ideas on a large scale. When this is taken into account, all images are copies or derivations. This negates the first point about derivative art and imagination.

The second point is that art represents a truth that is never represented perfectly. There are two arguments to counter this.

First that this is a trick. Just because one truth is represented imperfectly it doesn't mean all other truths are. A painting doesn't have to convey what the artist wanted. A painting can mean something different, but still true, raw and touching to a viewer. In this case an artwork can convey ideal knowledge.

Secondly it is possible to calculate or see the ideal that the artist was aiming to represent, and then re-represent that in a better way.

Thus, an artwork can be based on a previous artwork and still represent a new and fundamental truth. My false dichotomy is hereby evaporated!

Mark Sheeky, 4 January 2010