Art is theft, Ctd Ronald Searle and Morten Morland

Ronald Searle above. Morten Morland remixes below:

And below is Quentin Blake:

Art is theft, Ctd Morten Morland

Morten Morland wrote here:

"Influence, plagiarism, copying etc, is a difficult subject in any creative profession. It’s been said that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, but I have a feeling it was a plagiarist who first said it. In court. On his knees. It’s bollocks of course. In its purest form it’s the sincerest form of laziness… 

In a profession like cartooning though, it can often be difficult to distinguish between intentional plagiarism and (unfortunate) coincidence, and between influence and identity theft. I reckon most cartoonist at some point must have drawn a cartoon and realised afterwards that the idea was not a result of their own brilliance, but an unintentional ‘rip-off’ of an idea they’d seen in the past. As most cartoonists themselves are eager follower of cartoons, it is not entirely surprising that this can happen.

Art is theft, Ctd Peter Brookes

@Blowercartoons ....and here's one I did earlier! pic.twitter.com/gdvqLmPCpR
— Peter Brookes (@BrookesTimes) July 5, 2013

Aleks Krotoski on Combinatorial Creativity

On a recent BBC Radio 4 show, 'Last Bus to Serendip' Aleks Krotoski (@aleksk) discussed serendipity (her blog runs some stuff on it here and here as well). Serendipity being that delightful learning moment or moment of discovery, encounter or chance meeting that can change the course of your life. That happy accident we've nearly all had. We're all like lightning conductors to everyone else's lightning. The term was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th Century man of letters who created the word after the Three Princes of Serendip who made great discoveries whether through chance or sagacity.

 

Aleks Krotoski explored serendipity its role and effect in building networked knowledge and fuelling combinatorial creativity. She asked the poet Richard Price, "Do you think about serendipity during the creative process and when writing poetry?" He responded by explaining the two types of serendipity. The first kind of serendipity:

"Very much so. There are two kinds of serendipity for poets. One is serendipity of influence. A good example is, I'm in a second hand book shop in Brighton. I come across the biography of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and I'm very taken by his WW1 poetry. 15 years later, I'm working on my last book 'Small World' which is just about parenthood. There is no connection there. Yet Apollinaire's style - that became really careful for 'Small World'."   

Aleks interjected: "The reason why people talk about libraries as sources of serendipity is that 2 books next to one another could have completely different topics but could bump well against one another. But you're talking about war and parenthood - some people may not see the connection. To be able to see that connection is quite a skill."

"Maybe but it's also to do with the industrial process of reading tonnes and tonnes of things."

"[Writing] is Theft" Ctd Thomas Lynch, Yeats, Auden, Heaney, etc.

 

On the death of Seamus Heaney, Michigan-based undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch paid tribute to the Irish poet on BBC Radio 3 with an essay which spoke on the role of combinatorial creativity. He said:

"I stole that thing about a bridge from another poet who read it somewhere or stole it from another one or made it up. It's what we do, rent to own. Borrow, steal, make things up... When Auden got word of Yeats' death he wrote his famous elegy in memory of William Butler Yeats in which he gives his own directive, borrowing the dead man's table manners:

"Earth receive an honored guest

William Yeats is laid to rest,

Let the Irish vessel like emptied of its poetry."

When Brodsky died, too young, too soon in 1996 Heaney borrowed for Audenesque the rhyme and meter that Auden borrowed from Yeats, and Yeats from Blake and Blake from maybe a children's rhyme."