CULTURAL COPYING

The cultural provenance of your ideas and solutions is what will establish what is valued, and what is not. How you manage, parse and organize the Googlized information flood is a significant part of our creative method. The highest cultural value will be created by those whose method works the best.

As I have said before, nobody really talks about the provenance of our creative solutions. While there might be a superficial discussion of what shaped the formation of an object, the method of enclosure and form generation is largely missing. Discussion of copying and appropriation is definitely missing. And I firmly believe that a method like Transparent Drawing is a step, small thought it may be, in that direction.

Transparency in drawing and transparency in design gives us one method in which we can sort, parse, and manage all of the cross cultural influences that we are bombarded with.  It gives us a way to manage cultural copying.

Abject copying of cultural examples or references is already being questioned. There was the recent article in The New York Times by Parul Sehgal titled “Is Cultural Appropriation Always Wrong?” (NY Times Magazine, Sept 29, 2015,) Substitute the word copying for appropriation, and tighten things up, you get Is Copying Wrong?

With a weak method, copying is wrong. With a strong method, copying is right. This is a difficult concept to sort out for yourself, precisely because it has been swept under the rug for so long. We really don’t even know how to talk about this. As usual, here again we have language lagging behind and unable to spin up to a cultural question.

Sehgal writes:

“Questions about the right to your creation and labor, the right to your identity, emerge out of old wounds in America, and they provoke familiar battle stances.”

Familiar battle stances. Which means, as I said, we don’t really know even how to talk about this.