On the one hand, our current emerging youth culture celebrates the remix, the mash-up, and the appropriation. On the other hand, if you pick up something and recontextualize it enough to make it your own, you will offend someone in the process.
But on the gripping hand, recontextualization is a large part of where new art comes from, and what keeps old stories alive. All the "fairy tales" us Americans are familiar with come from a set of folk stories a few European ethnologists wrote down and edited to their moral standards; later, a man crazy enough to want to make feature-length cartoons had his crew create new versions of them that have largely replaced the textual versions in American culture.
I figure, if one person loves a myth enough to spend five years of her life making a feature-length cartoon based on it, she's going to have found some interesting things to say about it - some highly respectful. Nobody spends that kind of unpaid creative effort on something they completely disrespect. But I, too, am a middle-class white woman. A lucky one, as the Muse hasn't come down and smacked me on the head with another culture's Great Epic. Yet. Everything I'm ripping off in my art is made by dead male European honkies, and I am a Euro-descended honky, so nobody can call me a cultural imperialist when I rip off Winsdor McCay.
I also suspect that as the world continues to shrink thanks to information technology, this is only going to get worse.
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But on the gripping hand, recontextualization is a large part of where new art comes from, and what keeps old stories alive. All the "fairy tales" us Americans are familiar with come from a set of folk stories a few European ethnologists wrote down and edited to their moral standards; later, a man crazy enough to want to make feature-length cartoons had his crew create new versions of them that have largely replaced the textual versions in American culture.
I figure, if one person loves a myth enough to spend five years of her life making a feature-length cartoon based on it, she's going to have found some interesting things to say about it - some highly respectful. Nobody spends that kind of unpaid creative effort on something they completely disrespect. But I, too, am a middle-class white woman. A lucky one, as the Muse hasn't come down and smacked me on the head with another culture's Great Epic. Yet. Everything I'm ripping off in my art is made by dead male European honkies, and I am a Euro-descended honky, so nobody can call me a cultural imperialist when I rip off Winsdor McCay.
I also suspect that as the world continues to shrink thanks to information technology, this is only going to get worse.
Who owns a Great Cultural Epic?