Create.

I used to be very insecure about my creative ability.

This insecurity has long since passed, now that I’m older and generally more confident, but it’s something that I do reflect on from time to time. After all, when you’re surrounded by so many people who can do incredible things – visual artists, graphic designers, musicians, voice over artists and just about everything else you can think of – it’s hard not to feel like you need to “measure up” to them in some way, and equally hard not to feel discouraged or even depressed when you can’t “create” works of art the way the people around you are seemingly able to.
Of course, the creation of art, and “creativity” in general, doesn’t actually work like this. If societies and the people in them are, as Marx once put it¹, products of their own material cicumstances, then it’s pretty safe to say that each individual person’s art, whatever shape it may take, is simply the culmination of every work of art they’ve ever engaged with. Not exactly a new idea – “there are no truly original works” is kind of just a fact of art as a whole. But, y’know, there are plenty of artistic pursuits where the artists not only draw on influences from other works, but create art that is entirely contingent on the existence of works made by others. I want to talk about those works, and why they can comfortably be called “art”.

But first, listen to this song.

The artist known only as “pluffaduff” has been at this mashup business for a while now, but started gaining notoriety a few years ago when their musical creations were picked up on by high-profile members of the Clone Hero content creation sphere, primarily Acai and JasonParadise. Mashups have been around in music spheres for a long-ass time – they’re a staple part of any self-respecting DJ’s repertoire – but artists like pluffaduff really highlight just how much creativity, energy and passion go into a form of musical composition that can only exist because countless others have composed countless pieces of music before them. There’s novelty to it, sure, but it’s also an entirely new listening experience that feels more like a part of the artist than of any of the other artists whose works went into the final product’s composition.

Now, read this review of Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop adaptation. I promise we won’t actually spend that much time talking about Cowboy Bebop.

Obviously, the existence of this adaptation in and of itself is proof of the ability to create something mostly new² out of someone else’s creation, I think the more pertinent point to focus on is this particular review of the adaptation. David Ehrlich spends time talking about the moral and artistic merits of adapting Cowboy Bebop in this way, as well as in general, and spends much time discussing what the original show has to say, and consequently, what its adaptation completely misses. Again, this is not peculiar – literary analysis and artistic criticism have existed since forever. But it’s the way that these analyses and critiques are used to discuss broader ideas about the concept of Cowboy Bebop, and of filmmaking as a whole, in some respects, that shows just what goes into art criticism. And it’s hard to deny the art of criticism when so many critics have such a way with words.³

This new show is the product of a culture that exhumes yesterday because it’s run out of fresh ideas for tomorrow, and its vision of the future is so sterile and uninspired that it often feels like nothing more than a cheap vision of the waking life that everyone in Watanabe’s original was trying so hard to sleep off.

And much like mashups, it’s undoubtedly an art form – an art form that can only exist due to the works of art created by the people around us.

Humans are honestly incredible, when you get right down to it. We make everything – from the tools we use to get our necessities, to the technologies we use in our day to day life, to just about everything in between. I believe that humanity is, at its core, a creative species. We create the world around us, and the many works of art that serve as a means to express ourselves in that world, essentially as a compulsion. We can’t help ourselves – creating is just what we do.

And if the things you create can only be given form by that which others have created? That’s fantastic – after all, music production and music fusion, art and art criticism, are not adversarial relationships. They’re collaborative.

So let’s create together.