The Holiday Card

Now that ‘Holiday Season ‘08’ is in the bag, it’s probably as good a time as any to wax philosophical about our holiday E-card. This year’s concept stemmed from a colorful conversation that included a retelling of some of the more infamous moments from Manning parties past, as well as a discussion about office party clichés. With a little Photoshop magic and a few hundred hours of work, what emerged was a bizarre virtual party that combined celebrities, pop-culture references, employee debauchery, and more than a little alcohol. But we got there aided by using content that was ‘borrowed’.

If you happened to visit the site, have a pulse and even a slight sense of humor, you’ll probably agree that the final result was at least mildly entertaining. Or anyway, we were fairly proud of it. But when you really think critically about what makes the site successful (and since we hope to eventually get better at what we do, we try to do this once in a while) you can’t help but realize that the amusement has its foundations in a lot of shared cultural experiences.

Drawing on Culture

In our postmodern, pop-culture devouring society, customs like Christmas have taken on a sometimes perverse universality. (The perversion is driven largely by a strong commercial undercurrent, but that’s probably another discussion entirely.) So in America in 2008, shoppers in Miami have their holiday cheer whipped into a frenzy by Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ just the same as their counterparts in Montana. Never mind that there’s a good chance that the Floridians have never actually experienced a snow-covered December 25th—they know that Christmas is supposed to be white. Americans’ idyllic notions of the holiday season have become something of a mash-up between personal memories and inherited cultural memes.

You don’t have to take my word for it. ‘A Christmas Story’, the most sugar-coated, nostalgic vignette of Christmas Americana ever put to film, has become a cultural staple. During the 2007 version of TBS’ annual airing of a 24-hour marathon of the movie, over 45 million viewers tuned in. That’s 15% of the population tuning in for something on cable.

It’s this shared awareness of Christmas iconography that allowed us to give our friends and clients a good laugh. Because mixed in with hard-drinking employees, angry snowmen, and the president-elect were references to ‘A Christmas Story’, ‘The Nutcracker’, ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘The Grinch’ and others.

Creativity, Originality

Here’s the twist: As ‘creatives’, we’re supposed to endeavor to come up with unique and original solutions to our clients’ and our own design challenges. When we do so, we are credited with ownership of the resulting product. It’s this premise that protects the value of our business. Similarly, copyright law protects the creators of the Christmas classics listed previously.

But at the same time, if our goal is to give people a holiday-inspired laugh, would we be leaving something on the table by not referencing pop culture?It was our opinion that indeed we would be. So to create our holiday party, we borrowed heavily from existing (and most likely copyrighted) material.

Is this practice acceptable? Since our intent was primarily to create art (whether or not this term an apt description is up for debate) and not to realize financial gain, we took the position that our use of copyrighted material was ok. Had the original creators of this material decided our work was financially or artistically threatening, we would have gladly pulled the plug. But it was our belief that what we created stood on its own as a unique form of expression.

We Didn’t Start the Fire

From Dada collages and ready-mades to Andy Warhol’s ‘Soup Cans’, we are by no means the first to explore this artistic grey area. But the rise of the desktop computer, the internet, and the availability of media via applications like YouTube and peer-to-peer file sharing has allowed virtually anyone to enter this arena. I thought it might be interesting to explore some other examples of this process. And by far, the easiest place to find this work being done in contemporary culture is in the music world.

Danger Mouse

In 2004, a producer by the name of Danger Mouse released the ‘Grey Album’—with songs created by using bits of The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ with a-capella verses from rapper Jay-Z’s 2003 disc ‘The Black Album’. Danger Mouse knew from the outset that he’d never be able to score legal rights to pursue this project, but the internet allowed him to distribute his work and it became a huge hit.

Although he made no money directly for his work on ‘The Grey Album’, he has since parlayed the notoriety it earned him into a successful career as a music producer. Along with rapper/singer Cee-Lo, he forms one half of the Grammy-winning group ‘Gnarls Barkley’. (Even the group name is ironically referential.) He has also released records as part of the British super-group ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Queen’, and most recently produced Beck’s newest record.

Girl Talk
Another producer, Greg Gillis, takes things to even more of an extreme. Under the name ‘Girl Talk’, Gillis has released dance-friendly albums of mash-ups that do not contain a single original note. Where most producers will use a sample as part of an original composition, Gillis creates songs by splicing together hundreds of samples. The result is a mind-blowing witches brew of top 40 songs mixed, mashed, and layered together into a cohesive whole.

Gillis’ work has appeared on ‘Best Albums of the Year’ lists and been critically acclaimed, but has also been called ‘a lawsuit waiting to happen’. So far he has avoided legal action, but his label has already prepared a defense based on a Fair Use argument. ‘Girl Talk’ has even been endorsed by a Pennsylvania congressman who is an advocate of Fair Use.

There Will Be Blood

In an example that bridges the gap between popular and classical music, the score for ‘There Will Be Blood’ was disqualified for Oscar contention in 2008 over issues of originality. The score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, was widely considered by critics to be one of the year’s best. Nearly 35 minutes of the film’s score was original composition, but 46 minutes consisted of Greenwood’s arrangements of songs in the public domain such as Brahms’ ‘Concerto in D Major’, along with some of his repurposed earlier compositions.

Sita Sings The Blues

The last example comes from the film world, but again regards music rights. Animator Nina Paley spent five years creating the film ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ which has gone on to critical acclaim. However, outside of the festival circuit, virtually no one has seen this film as its distribution is stuck in a legal gridlock over music usage rights.

Paley originally conceived of the idea for ‘Sita’ as a retelling of the Indian fable, Ramayana. The project was inspired by blues recordings by Annette Hanshaw, and much of the animation features musical numbers synchronized to these recordings.

Some Indian groups are angry over Paley’s use of the Ramayana story, and the usage rights for the Hanshaw recordings are being withheld by the record company which owns them. So the film remains unable to find a distributor.

Paley admits that she knew ahead of time that there would be potential issues with the recordings. However, her argument centers on the fact that copyright laws in their current interpretation stifle creativity. She sees the fact that artists are required to consider such issues so thoroughly as a factor that potentially hampers the artistic process.

The lines regarding ownership and artistic freedom are sure to become more blurry as the availability of technology expands. But creativity does not exist in a vacuum, and the question remains: at what point is something sufficiently recontextualized to constitute an original work of art?