Use and abuse of reference in the arts

Everything is quotation, everything is a remix, nothing new can be said, and good artists copy where real artists steal. I plus or minus agree with these statements; I’m willing even to call them insights. But as insights, they’ve inevitably been mis-applied, mis-interpreted, and generally abused.

Assume that everything is simply a rehashing of things that have come before.[1] This does not obligate an author[2] to put giant quotation marks around every statement. In fact, the author has a responsibility to hide those quotation marks, to create a seamless, coherent work. The term work, what does it mean? A work is something that works:it is defined by its seamless coherence.

My favorite John Waters movie is Pecker, in which Edward Furlong plays a kid from Baltimore who gets swept up in New York’s art scene. Most people have not seen Pecker. Many more have seen the Family Guy episode where Chris, Peter and Lois’s son, is swept up in the same New York art scene. King of the Hill had a similar episode, where Peggy, Hank Hill’s wife, is recognized as an “outsider artist” after she fashions a human form propane tanks.

And also the Simpsons: Homer’s failure to assemble a backyard barbecue results in the dragged-from-his-car-bumper debris from the hapless attempt being…recognized as outsider art.

I apologize if there is a South Park episode that covers the same ground that I am leaving out. But my point is this: the writers of Family Guy, King of the Hill, and the Simpsons were clearly influence by this John Waters movie. Or John Waters was himself influenced by many of the same stimuli that motivated the above episodes.

I wish these episodes contained footnotes, pointing people toward Pecker, perhaps toward each other. Most artistic media are at a great disadvantage compared to the essay in that the demands of seamless coherence often prevent a reader (or a viewer or a listener) from becoming aware of each reference, each homage, each blatant theft, and thus denies them an opportunity to be expose themselves to the full richness of the world’s civilizations.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but my relationship with the two strains of philosophy I hold must dear developed as a child. First, Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos, exposed me to Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. Cosmos is Sagan’s a love letter to ancient Greek civilization , which embodied a curious, practical, mathematical, cosmopolitan humanism.

And the other strain I can credit my childhood friend Charles Weber, who introduced me to the Cure (the band) and to “Killing an Arab,” one of their first singles and an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger. His novel lead me to “The Myth of Sisyphus” which referenced Kafka, Nietzsche, and other writers which I dutifully pursued. Robert Smith, the motivating force behind the Cure, in an interview, mentioned Nietzsche, and that launched a love affair which opened me to Schopenhauer, Freud, and others.

That picking up my father’s copy of Cosmos would lead me to reading hundreds of books is easily foreseeable. That I had the good fortune of having a friend like Charles and that I happened to be in the music store and bought a copy of the 1990 Guitar Player magazine which had an interview with Robert Smith in which he discussed how Nietzsche influenced his thoughts on music composition and performance is an instance of dumb luck, of good fortune.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is among my favorite novels. But it was a dead end until I met someone who intensely disliked the novel. He explained that there was little new in it, that, for example, all the stuff about about tennis is…stolen from The Inner Game of Tennis.

I have no problem with this at all. What I have a problem with is that I didn’t know that and I had no way of knowing that, and that it’s only because I happened to strike up a conversation with someone on a Quizo[3] team named “Eschaton” and asked about DFW that I received in my face his blowtorch of invective against the novel.

I started writing about Family Guy because it represents all that is wrong with cultural recycling. The specific instances I cited above, where Family Guy is (probably) referencing Pecker is an exception to the show’s style. All too often, the show does not simply take a good idea and make it its own; it takes an idea, a reference, and cites it. The enjoyment is not intended to come from the content itself, but from the smug knowingness that it gives viewers “in the know.” I got that reference: I am sophisticated and learned. Even if the references weren’t to pieces of disposable pop culture detritus, this feeling is unjustified.

Art should humble those who experience it, not create or confirm an existing feeling of educated superiority. Family Guy panders, attempts to gain your love by flattering the viewer. It is not art but pornography.

Art should expand the view’s world, and not through tedious scolding but through the sharing of the beautiful and wondrous and sublime—in art, in history, in nature, in people.

Notes

1: Yes, this may or may not literally be true, as it implies that there is no first time for anything to be said, and we are forced into a form of cultural creationism. Jung’s idea of the cultural unconsciousness seems to be just this sort of account of the origins of culture.

2: By author I mean, in general the creator of a work. A painter, a film director, a graphic designer: these are all authors.

3: Quizo is a pub quiz game, started by Pat Hines and held at Fergie’s Pub and other bars in Philadelphia. There are legal reasons, apparently, why it is spelled with a single “z”. The spelling of “Quizo” bothers me to no end.