Artists as inventors

I think that all this talk about the need for copyrighting your work comes from the mistaken notion that there are creative individuals who invent new ideas. We are so much a product of the particular society that we are born into. If you can locate the period of time and place that a person was born in, you can easily predict the types of thoughts and concerns that they will be having during the course of their lives. Sure people have different temperaments, but the objects of their imagination will always have a similar cast. The horizons of a given culture always frame the symbolic elements in a particular way. And to give someone credit for being an independent agent is to ignore the fact the one's peers, family, and the society in general are respondsible for creating the "individual". It is the society in general that recognizes a work of art as superior, maybe not always immediatley, but inevitably. It is the act of recognition that gives the work its significance. In recognizing a superior reflection of the cultural zeitgeist, the society chooses the pieces that serve as emblems of the contemporary. Jackson Pollock would have been completely forgotton if he made drip paintings a hundred years earlier. In addition, one of the biggests myths of Western culture is that there are in fact autonomous individuals. The notion helps to amplify ambition and competition, allowing the market to flourish. But we are literally nothing without others. We get no sense of self without the presence of the other.
-JP