The War for Art..

It’s Saturday night, September 12th, 2020. I am re-watching ‘Carlito’s Way’ (1993) on Netflix. As a cinema aficionado, I love revisiting the work of the masters every few years, with the hope of discovering some new jewels that I might have missed during previous outings. Brian De Palma happens to be one such master.

It’s Brian De Palma pairing up with Al Pacino again, ten years after ‘Scarface’, in yet another gangster flick. But that’s where the similarity ends. ‘Scarface’ was about the cockiness of Tony Montana, a young Cuban refugee in a hurry to make a dent in the universe (‘In this country you gotta make the money first. Then you get the power. Then you get the woman..’) and where, as the legend came to be, ‘For one brief moment, the world was his..’. In many ways, “Carlito’s Way’ is an antithesis of ‘Scarface’ where Carlito Brigante is a Puerto Rican gangster who wants to give it all up & retire in Miami, but who, due to cruel interventions by his destiny, keeps colliding with his past on the way. Both movies are classics in their own right.

But there’s something that bothers me. Maybe I need another drink, I think, and get a refill of my Bourbon. Still, the feeling doesn’t go away. Something is pricking my dormant memory and evoking a strange feeling. Disgust ? Why the hell should I feel disgusted while watching one of my favorite actors in a cult movie ? And then it comes to me after my 3rd drink !

There was this 1995 Bollywood flick called ‘Raamjaane’, directed by Rajiv Mehra & which starred a hyper-energetic Shahrukh Khan fresh on the heels of the iconic DDLJ. I remember having loved the premise of the movie & also Khan, who I was fast becoming a fan of ( despite critics sighing at his hamming).

As I watch ‘Carlito’s Way’, I can trace back the dots & see how Mehra had lifted his story from here. And what disgusts me more is that it was not a straight official adaptation giving credits to the original, but rather a slimy and sneaky theft, a tweak here, a sub-plot there. But the core is totally stolen. Like ‘Agneepath’ ( yet another Bollywood ‘epic’, shamelessly lifted from ‘Scarface’), ‘Raamjaane’ and its memories are the cause of my unease during this otherwise nice Saturday evening movie time.

Older I get, more offended I am with plagiarism. As cinema lovers who spent their teens in the pre-internet era, my generation of Indians ( & ones before ours) were force-fed a lot of cinema that we fell in love with, only to realize later that we were cheated & were actually made to appreciate stolen content. Same goes for music. I remember how sad I was on the day I discovered that ‘Tumse Milke’ was a ‘lifted tune’, by none other than the mighty RD.

And then there’s the written word. How often we read a blog post, an opinion column, a short story or a novel, and are plagued by a sense of uneasy familiarity of having read it somewhere else. Sometimes we join back the dots, sometimes we don’t. When we do, we feel violated . So much so that we sometimes lose interest in the original creator as well, given the seed of suspicion planted in us due to someone else committing an offence.

Yes, being inspired is necessary to create art. But being inspired & stealing are different things. You can still be inspired & create something of your own, preferably also giving full credit to the work that inspired you. Also, when you are young and taking baby steps into creativity, it is possible to inadvertently miss the overlapping boundaries of inspired art & stolen art. So when Kaavya Viswanathan was called out for plagiarism, I was still okay to pardon her & kind of like the Opal Mehta story ( she was barely 16 after all), but when someone like Fareed Zakaria conveniently borrows from Jil Lepore, I find it difficult to forgive. Likewise, no matter how much one makes fun of Chetan Bhagat, I was very angry when the so called ‘creative trio’ of Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Hirani & Aamir Khan literally bullied him & deprived him of his rightful credit for the original story of ‘3 Idiots’.

The internet has flipped the world of Art on its head. Today, it is extremely easy to steal, modify, disguise & re-sell someone else’s art. Many people make fortunes out of it. Some get caught & are stopped on their tracks . Others keep going with some aggressive marketing & endorsements by other big names ( You promote me, I’ll promote you) . A new age poster boy of self help was called out by multiple people for lifting other people’s quotes & using them as his own, after which he reportedly deleted a lot of content from his website & started assigning due credit. This guy has recently come out with his new book which is apparently trending as a bestseller. So yeah, maybe plagiarism is not taken so seriously after all !

Unless of course, if you yourself are an artist. Words are all that a writer or poet has, as his / her identity. By stealing or ‘borrowing’ their words, you are stealing their identity. Same goes for music. This is not just a legal matter, but a moral issue. A copyright violation can get you into trouble, but many a times you might still find a way around it by some clever tweaking. That however doesn’t absolve you of your moral responsibility. Towards art, and towards genuine patrons of art whom you are cheating with your second hand work.

Art doesn’t follow the exactness of science. Nor does it understand the gains of commerce. That’s what makes it art. Have you ever wondered what keeps this world going , despite so much of animosity and negativity that surrounds us at all times. Maybe, it is because of a bunch of crazy people called artistes - who possess a certain something that helps us escape into these little pockets of magic, and who gingerly lift us out of our bad days . Temporarily so. But gloriously so.

Don’t steal Art. Because if you continue to do so, a day will come when the artistes, moody people that they are, might revolt & stop making art ( remember ‘Atlas Shrugged’ ?).

A world without Art and Artistes will be difficult to live in. Trust me on this. 

===============================

My Saturday Post, 12/09/20

Do hit 'Like' and leave a comment if it connected with you. The views in my articles are personal & they may or may not be relevant to my day job.

Acknowledgement - The title of this post is inspired from Steven Pressfield's 'War of Art',which in turn was inspired by Sun Tzu's 'Art of War' :)

My new book, "As You Life It" - Available in Paperback & E-Book versions on the links as below -

Publisher's own website :

https://www.becomeshakespeare.com/product/as-you-life-it/

Amazon.in

https://www.amazon.in/As-you-Life-usual-unusual/dp/9390040086/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=As you Life it&qid=1599915744&sr=8-3

Google Playstore

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Ayon_Banerjee_As_you_Life_it_Work_as_usual_Life_as?id=_H34DwAAQBAJ&hl=en

Smashwords

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1039228

Kobo

https://www.kobo.com/in/en/ebook/as-you-life-it

Kindle

https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.es/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.it/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.in/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GCYC2G5

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08GCYC2G5

Amazon.com ( Paperback)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/9390040086

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/9390040086

https://www.amazon.de/dp/9390040086

https://www.amazon.fr/dp/9390040086

https://www.amazon.es/dp/9390040086

https://www.amazon.it/dp/9390040086

https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/9390040086