Shia LeBeouf has explained his recent bizarre behavior as ‘performance art’. All the plagiarizing allegations, the retiring from public life and headbutting a guy in a bar brawl. ALL of it, pretending to be bat ISHT crazy as part of Meta-Modernist art piece.
Shia states that all things are plagiarized. I wonder if that’s strictly true.
If for example someone makes a game or experience in Virtual Reality that hasn’t existed in VR previously, irrespective of a similar game or experience existing outside of VR, is it not an entirely new thing by virtue of the fact it is experienced in an entirely new way that simply was not possible previously?
It’s like inventing an entirely new form of media and entertainment in the first place, in the same way film came after books and did things that were simply impossible in books prior to the existence of film as a medium, so surely all things become new again in that respect. The stories are basically the same but the experience can be entirely different to anything that came before it and stories are only a small individual part of the experience, as are any other familiar elements, but not the whole.
All stories are maybe just variations of a few core ideas and maybe all books have been done in principle but until film came along not all films had been done, regardless of the stories being basically the same as in the books before them. The film medium itself meant you could now do stuff that had never been done in any books, or plays or radio shows or whatever, prior to it’s existence. Maybe it’s similar with new technologies and forms of experiencing entertainment and media, etc.
As far as LeSpoof goes, I’m all for challenging what re-mixing really means because in a sense no idea is really original at all but built upon and influenced by the previous works before it. And he did, indeed, open up conversation about plagiarism…but it was about culture. He wasn’t creating discussion about Tumblr or society, his actions weren’t inspiring conversation about how we share art, it was inspiring conversation about how he steals it. He openly admitted to borrowing other’s work without crediting it. That’s the bottom line. His meltdown err manifesto might have merit if he had asked for the creator’s permission to use in his experiment, but he didn’t. This isn’t a meta-modernist movement, this is an excuse. I feel as though he has lost his mind and can only use others words instead of his own to convey his ideas and opinions with little original thought.
Art is obviously many different things to many different people. But to me, it needs to be more than a meme, which is the vibe I’m getting here. True creators are inspired by great works to create their own. We may see something so profound and moving that it leaves it’s mark on us and use it in our own works. Our OWN WORKS, art born of passion, personal experience, blood and sweat. Taking someone else’s creation VERBATIM and repurposing it as your own work is PLAGIARISM. In short, make your own ISHT.
-Dagobot
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