Art Builds Upon Art: Nina Paley’s New Video

From the mak­er of Sita Sings the Blues comes a new short film that artis­ti­cal­ly deliv­ers a sim­ple mes­sage: “All cre­ative work builds on what came before.” Using arti­facts from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, Nina Paley draws the visu­al con­clu­sion that art bor­rows and remix­es – that noth­ing is real­ly out of the box. This argu­ment res­onates for some. For oth­ers, it falls flat. Either way, the film is worth a watch. (You can down­load high-res and Ogg ver­sions at the Inter­net Archive.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing is a Remix (A Short Film)


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Comments (2)
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  • Mike says:

    It’s fun­ny. It used to be an insult when some­one said your work was “deriv­a­tive.” To say that art builds on what came before it is an extreme­ly triv­ial state­ment. It can also be said of phi­los­o­phy, sci­ence, and civ­i­liza­tion in gen­er­al. What dis­tin­guish­es cre­ative work from uncre­ative work — what defines it — is that it brings into exis­tence some­thing which did not exist before. If a work is high­ly deriv­a­tive it isn’t very cre­ative; if it’s whol­ly deriv­a­tive, it isn’t cre­ative at all.

  • Adam Pope says:

    We have a moral respon­si­bil­i­ty to — a con­tract with — our ances­tors to hand down their cre­ativ­i­ty to our descen­dants; and if pos­si­ble to build cre­ative­ly upon it in the process.

    This phi­los­o­phy is part of what makes us human; and copy­right augers direct­ly against it.

    To whom do we owe the use of wheel? We owe it to our ances­tors to bet­ter it for our descen­dants. Cer­tain­ly not some dick-bag wheel-patent troll.

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