Creativity vs. Co-optivity

This is a larger topic than this post has room to do justice to. The question I raise is not a new question in the arenas of art, popular culture and commerce. When artists, and I’ll use this term broadly enough to include rap/hip hop artists and even “advertising artists”, borrow or pay homage to or include a reference to the content of another piece of art, or include the actual piece of art, as happens very often in music, particularly rap music, and as also happens constantly within advertising, is this creativity? Or is it simply what I term “co-optivity”?

Of course, as is maddeningly true of any question of this sort, we immediately sink into a dark grey semantic sinkhole—what do we mean by “borrow”, “creativity” and so forth?

And the answer, if there even is one, will wind up somewhere in the middle, and totally case-dependent.

Nevertheless, the question bears asking because the simple act of raising the question may help quell the everpresent tendency to cross whatever the line is between borrowing and stealing, between paying homage and plagiarism, and ultimately, between creativity and co-optivity.

Let’s consider just two old examples that I can’t seem to shake:

Beck has a song called “Devil’s Haircut” from the Odelay CD, which is built on the defining riff of an obscure song by Van Morrison’s formative band, Them. It’s not just built on the riff, however, it is built on a faithful reconstruction of that riff, as it was executed in the Them song, fuzz guitar and all. Beck took a key piece of another artist’s work and created a different song built on this same piece. Never mind the legalities, how much of another artist’s work are you allowed to steal, and how little do you need to change it, and still be able to claim that it is your creation?

While he didn’t sample the actual recording, such sampling is a common practice, and while these samples are often used as seasoning for some musical piece, there are those who compose songs around them, which is just taking what Beck and many others have done one step further.

Last night I heard a musical piece by a “mashup” artist with the moniker, “Girl Talk”, in which he peppers his composition with several samples of others’ work, each playing a fairly prominent role. I didn’t recognize all of the samples, but his composition begins by leaning heavily on a sample of The Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’”. So here we have an entire musical genre, or sub genre, that feeds shamelessly off the creativity of others, pretending to share authorship.

The textbook example of co-optivity in advertising is when the Budweiser creatives at DDB Chicago lifted the characters and schtick from an independent film and more or less re-created them for the purpose of selling Bud. The “Whassup” campaign was critically acclaimed and showered with accolades. It was as if these creatives had actually thought of the idea or something. Is this what creativity in advertising consists of? The audacity of theft?

Advertising seems to be increasingly Simpsonized, where the power of advertisements relies on pop cultural references, which is a practice that already skirts the edge of co-optivity. But when allegedly creative people don’t simply make a reference, but, rather, resort to ripping out entire chunks of someone else’s creation and claim them as their own, how is it creative?

I loathe intellectual dishonesty, especially when it’s not me doing it. And I submit that co-optivity is inherently intellectually dishonest.

I told you that this topic is too large to do justice to here.