I just finished reading My Name is Red, a fascinating novel by Orhan Pamuk, which has set off several internal debates on the creative process, artistic influences, and how these concepts manifest themselves in the present day.
The primary characters in the story were Fifteenth Century painters who worked for the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, a particularly avid supporter of book arts. In the painters’ Istanbul workshop, the masters placed extreme importance on creating exact replicas of ancient illustrations – of scenes from the Koran, or poems by ancient writers. Any evidence of a painter’s attempts to cultivate a personal style was disdained.
Essentially, the creative process in the Ottoman workshop involved exhaustive replication of the ancient masters’ paintings, with the ultimate intent of being able to re-create these illustrations without even looking at the page or the subject.
I have been thinking to myself, since reading the book, how much things have changed – whereas the Ottoman Empire rejected the concept of “style”, our contemporary culture wholly embraces the stylized and new. So much so, in fact, that if the work of an artist too closely resembles that of others who came before, the artist risks accusations of unoriginality. These days, one’s style is one’s art.
That said there is something that remains the same in the creative process of old and that of today. While perusing band websites recently, I noticed a theme that has cropped up in the media surrounding nearly all art forms: creative people consider it acceptable to list their “influences”. It is as though the artist is saying, “you need to know where I came from in order to completely understand how I cultivated my personal style.”
The key difference between ancient and modern art, then, is the emphasis on style combined with an ever-more individualized canon. In this sense, the new creative process is a testament to our globalized, contemporary culture: take the various creative elements you have been exposed to, find the most meaningful parts and work on replicating them, then once you’ve honed your artistic skills, add some personal elements and you’ve created something that is uniquely your own.
I think my favorite example of this right now is turn-tabling. I was listening to the Girl Talk album last week and was amazed at how unique each song is, while the content itself is nothing you haven’t heard before. They don’t even need to cite their “influences” because you can hear every one on the track!
