Three Main Reasons for Plagiarism in Art
Ещё одна статья о плагиата в искусстве посвящена трём главным причинам плагиата. Оригинал статьи на английском здесь. Также привожу полный английский текст ниже.
Three Main Reasons for Plagiarism in Art
Some people may think that art is very simple – they
might become experts on the arts and implement various artistic elements in
their everyday lives. Nevertheless, arts are connected by various complicated
relationships and ties. One of those connections is plagiarism.
How did it happen that the world of art is full of
plagiarism, copying, rewriting and borrowing of ideas from other artists?
I assume that it is all caused by the nature of art
itself. And this must be the major reason for plagiarism in art.
Initially, during the times of antiquity, mythology
was dominating, and it unified religion, history, culture, philosophy and art.
Mythology was syncretic and synthetic, and so were the components of it that
later became independent. While after the mythology split into art and religion
and philosophy turned out to be autonomous, they always tried to unify again.
It can be seen in many synthetic works like, for example, those of the Middle
Ages, when art was serving religious purposes, or in the Renaissance, when
philosophy of the Renaissance epoch served as the background for the intensive
development of the arts and slow decay of the religion.
The same process is a peculiar feature of the world of
art. Syncretic, unified, single art – as a purely creative desire and habit –
during several centuries split into several intermingled streams:
- technical art (including sculpture, architecture and
painting)
- and muse art (literature, its genres and the art
of eloquence).
Later on, the arts continued fragmentation and
separation into smaller streams and crafts, more genres of literature, music,
theatre, etc. appeared. The originally singular goddess called Muse turned into
three sister muses, and later on into seven goddesses led by Apollo. As all
arts had the same origin, they also had specific ties and relationships, like
relatives do. The same great-great-great-grandmother art had many descendants
who in turn produced many children, thus, during the course of history, literature
split into drama, poetry and prose. Poetry developed its own genres, drama
formed different theatrical genres, and music separated from poetry and
established its own forms. The tree of arts had more and more branches growing
in each epoch.
REASONS FOR PLAGIARISM
1. Need for copying
As all arts had the same original stem and the same
original stories, plots and fables, artists tried to re-evaluate them, to
rework, rewrite, and reinvestigate them from the perspective of new independent
arts. As soon as the new art or genre or artistic approach felt its
significance and autonomy, it started reorganising the world around it. On the
one hand, the artists discovered new things, pursued new horizons and wrote new
plots, stories, and fables. On the other hand, they always referred to the
plots and drafts from the original artistic stem source and rewrote them
according to the demands and techniques of new genres. The stories were
multiplied, copied, and borrowed, and thus added much to the field of plagiarism.
This can be called the need for copying – the necessity of arts to
fill in the artistic gaps and provide adaptation to the plots that already
exist in other arts. In such cases there will be a lot of adaptations
within synthetic pairs that developed during the whole history of the arts
(music-poetry, poetry-painting, music-architecture, etc.)
2. Inspiration from contemporary arts
As for the second reason for plagiarism, the new works
and new topics (if they are more or less successful or interesting, if they
have extra potential for adaptations) discovered by new genres will attract
attention of the artists working in other genres and arts of the same epoch. Artists
will spend time learning the works from contemporary arts and will get inspired
for adaptations and copies. Someone will simply write a
poem about a phenomenal statue (as many prominent poets did), someone will
rediscover the forgotten and almost-lost old drama and rewrite it into a new
work, keeping half of the original lines and rhymes. This will also fertilise
the plagiarism field and can be called the personal reason of each artist to
plagiarise – to learn the works of contemporaries, find something new or
long-forgotten and develop it in the manner specific to the given artist who
partially copies the original source.
3.
Cultural need
The third possible reason for plagiarism in the arts
is that of a cultural need. Art history has plenty of masterpieces and genius
works of art. One day, they can become outdated and misunderstood or
unacceptable for the current culture or generations. Society is not able to
forget or ignore them, but it is still not able to accept or understand them in
the same way. Then, new explanations or interpretations of the already popular
plots and stories are needed. Here, we get new visions of Hamlet on stage (as
every century had different types of Hamlets in their theatres, even though
they were saying the same lines). Here we have the works of Roman dramatists or
Molière, who were eager to rewrite the Ancient Greek dramas and change the
concept and dramatic components according to the needs and morals of or Ancien
Régime France.
Such plagiarism includes transformation of the stories
and their rediscovery, like, for instance, Jorge Luis Borges liked to do:
to take a famous story, to look at the plot from another angle and to surprise
the reader; half of the text can remain the same, but it will never be accepted
or understood in the same way people used to understand it before.
To sum it up, except for personal reasons, when the
artists try to experiment with what they have during their lifetime, the
plagiarism is caused by:
- the necessity of the arts to fill in the artistic gaps caused by
separation of arts and their desire to unify and become syncretic again
- and cultural needs for new morals and new adaptation of the
existing masterpieces that are not suitable for the new generations,
epochs, societies, and cultures.