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Oct 14, 2011

Bob Dylan, Beyonce Face Questions Of Artistic License : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

Nice piece from NPR, “What’s New Is Always Old,” takes a look at plagiarism claims against Bob Dylan, and Beyonce, who recently used dance moves from choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker:

De Keersmaeker is quoted in The Guardian as saying: “What’s rude is that they don’t even bother about hiding it. They seem to think they could do it because it’s a famous work … Am I honoured? Look I’ve seen local school kids doing this. That’s a lot more beautiful.”

This will sound familiar:

Anxieties about plagiarism can seem to have a new urgency in our era in which ideas, images, thoughts and inventions are so easily reduced to data strings that can be transmitted, reproduced and manipulated with little cost and effort. “Sampling” is the word we now use to refer to the practices of assembling and recombining words, song and movement of others in new ways to make something new out of something old.
Sampling is nothing new, not in art, and not in life. Every time you use a word or phrase you are, wittingly or not, making a pastiche out of the linguistic gestures of those who came before you. Evolution, whether in biology, or in technology and culture, is never anything other than a redeployment of old means in new circumstances. We use the old to make the new and the new is always old.

(Thanks to Marc Hinz!)