What is the relationship between an artist’s public role and their private convictions?
Though Dylan outgrew his roots in traditional folk music, his skill in appropriation marks him as employing an artistic method that is undeniably “folk” and places him as a member of a longstanding tradition of folk cultures in the United States. Folk traditions began as oral traditions, which means they had to fit in the fallible human mind…so it is essential to folk traditions that they recycle or reuse various elements such as melodies, lyrics, phrases, characters, titles, and events. These mechanisms serve to signal what sort of tradition the song is operating in as well as transmit important cultural truths in ways that can be both readily identifiable and digestible for other members of the community, those “in the know.” The most famous example is the musical traditions associated with the blues, which date back to African-American folk cultures living in the US during the institution of chattel slavery in the 17th century. In the blues, appropriation is a method for both continuing and changing a historical conversation that started long before one joined but that one judges as worth participating in and thus continuing, albeit with minor modifications.
Appropriation is a method of artistic creation that wears the essentially self-referential nature of art on its sleeve, that every work of art is an invitation to participate in an ongoing inside joke. But, just like inside jokes, one must have the relevant background experiences to discern and appreciate what “makes it” funny or significant, as well as the appropriate degree of trust to suspend their typical expectations or assumptions. One must trust that there is a point to the borrowing, to the blatant referencing, even if they can’t quite discern what it is, just like we trust a comedian that their use of taboo words or phrases has a greater purpose than mere shock or humiliation - a point that vindicates its otherwise “offensive” features. If there isn’t a point, then the work fails to be anything more than artistic product-placement.
Importantly, trust is neither unconditional nor based on fleeting feelings, as opposed to the cold, hard truth which philosophers want to tell you exists independently of humans altogether. We can have good reasons and evidence to trust other people, or to mistrust them. Institutional accreditation is a standardized method that
(supposedly) helps us identify trustworthy sources; we have good reasons to offer a high degree of trust to the testimony of a scientist, or perhaps good reasons to distrust our child’s retelling of their playground scuffle. Not everyone will have the sufficient degree of trust to discern or appreciate the work’s aesthetic features, and they may have good reasons for doing so. But lack of familiarity with the relevant subject matter is not a persuasive reason.
Of course, not everyone will find every joke funny, and some people find jokes funny that are really just poor taste, but that someone does not find some joke funny is not sufficient evidence for determining that the joke is an utter failure. One laugh makes a joke but the absence of laughter does not constitute a comedic misfire. A failure to “get” a joke can of course mean that the jokester has misjudged their audience, but in cases where a great many people find the joke funny or meaningful, one has at least some reason to increase their familiarity with the relevant sources in order to “get it.” This might come naturally, as well. My Austrian MA advisor pointed out to me that he simply did not understand Seinfeld until he had lived in the US for a few years and became sufficiently familiar with various US conventions and stereotypes. Funnily enough, appropriation now seems like a type of academic exercise after all, one has to do or have done enough background research to actually understand what’s going on.
Poet, writer, and cultural critic Nathaniel Mackey has written extensively on the relation between artistic creation and identity, specifically in the context of the experiences of black people living in the global north. Since the rise of third-wave feminism and the importance of intersectionality, progressive ideologies have shifted emphasis from the notion of the self or subject as a wholly discreet entity to the idea that subjects are composed of elements that derive their reality from their relation to a cultural or historical group or community. What was once the priority of the individual is now the primacy of the group. Mackey has warned that contemporary progressive writers and critics have gone astray in merely replacing the priority of the individual with that of the community or culture, while maintaining its underlying structure. Mackey believes that the contemporary liberal emphasis on individuality and agency as a function of group-membership, and group membership as a product of an indelible yet shared history or collection of experiences, threatens to reify the same assumptions it purports to “problematize.” If the goal is to shift away from assumptions that there is some observable “me,” then why replace it with the assumption that there is a discernible “we” ?
Mackey endorses a methodology that he terms “black centrifugal writing” that draws from the actual practices of back creators like blues musicians Colman Hawkins and Blind Willie McTell. According to Mackey, the centrifugal method continually resists the impulse that calls for a creator or individual to define or identify oneself as a member of (and thus responsible to a discernible or countable) tradition, something antecedently “given” whereby it is shared and agreed upon that certain practices or attitudes are permissible and others are forbidden. Mackey asks us to draw on the model of the family as a place from which we necessarily derive our sense of self and history, and the values that depend on them, and as the original site from which we continually escape or flee in the attempt to distinguish ourselves as individuals. Centrifugal writing,
…says that “we” was never a swifter fiction—not so much a war between family and flight as the familial song of one’s feeling for flight. It says that only such admitted fugitivity stands a ghost of a chance of apportioning prodigal truth. This is one of the lessons it has learned from black music. It remembers that Coleman Hawkins felt no identity crisis playing an instrument invented by a Belgian, that Lester Young referred to the keys of his horn as his people.
A family is a “we” something that a person both needs but didn’t fully choose, understand or wholly endorse, but cannot live without. Mackey asserts that centrifugal writing begins by saying “goodby” to all “givens” - that there is anything certain, necessary, or stable. To flee is simultaneously to acknowledge, rather than ignore or avoid but importantly it is not an attitude of mere adherence either - we flee what is familiar but threatens to consume us.
In the context of the blues tradition(s), appropriation is a means of making an authentic whole out of seemingly impersonal, and in some cases wholly uninteresting, parts. Successful artistic production, on the folk model, isn’t achieved until one has been appropriated. Appropriation is at once an expression of one’s subjectivity that complicates the very notion of a subject, that in its intelligibility it renders the singular subject less intelligible. Where does the appropriator’s “true” feelings begin? According to Mackey, centrifugal writing reveals that the very notion of a “we,” a intelligible and discreet (countable) collection of concrete people distinguished by their shared history, values, culture, or experiences and from which one derives their understanding of who they are as a “me,” someone who is the creator and “owner” of their ideas and creations as a reflection of that history - is merely a fiction masquerading as a more liberating reality.
I think appropriation is a mechanism by which public artists like Dylan can engage in centrifugal creation, fleeing the unfulfillable demand for originality and the confines of tradition that provide them with the very conditions for meaningful artistic production in the first place - the audience is the family the artist always finds themselves fleeing. Appropriation is at once a way to acknowledge oneself as indebted to others, and as a way to subvert the associated responsibilities and commitments of that acknowledgement. Appropriation unmoors the very concept of a “self” or an author as a discreet entity altogether, as well as the “we” on which that self depends.
It’s important to note as well that many blues songs are laced with satire and irony - from Blind Willie McTell’s satirical take on domestic violence, to Leadbelly’s observation that, “a white man had the blues once, wasn’t nothing to worry about.” The blues demonstrates how appropriation and humor can come together to function as a powerful and redemptive artistic medium. Humor enables us to acknowledge what is otherwise insulting or degrading, granting a certain amount of emotional distance from it at the same time, which provides fertile conditions for authentic expression - it no longer has any authority over them. I’ll write another nine-thousand word essay about this someday as well.
Okay, so you might be thinking that, sure, appropriation is all fine and well when its used in music and poetry, but memoirs, documentaries, and Nobel speeches are another thing - Dylan ignored or flouted the norms that distinguish memoirs from fiction, documentaries from performance art, and award speeches from creative exercises. In that sense Dylan really is a liar, rather than a centrifugal jokester. But, I think the very demand or expectation for wholly original work reveals the misplaced expectations of the offended, rather than the failings of the offender. Instead of being the victim of a lie, it is a failure to appreciate a clever joke.
This is what happens when the audience has expectations.
Being a popular and beloved artist brings with it a rather robust but constraining set of expectations from both appreciators and critics (the so-called artistic hecklers). Dylan has been producing work for 60 years, and with that comes the weight of one’s own achievements and history, a history that perpetually re-creates itself for each new generation with a passing curiosity and access to Google. But, is an artist still the same person - artistically speaking - as they were five, twenty, forty years ago? Doesn’t authenticity also demand change? The very idea of a “historical documentation” or “description” of Dylan’s life is loaded with innumerable and ultimately unfulfillable public expectations and assumptions. Go ask George R.R. Martin how useful those are for artistic creativity. Though an artist both needs appreciators and thus their expectations, at the same time they cannot not allow themselves to be dictated by them, which can also come off as placating and thus inauthentic. Check out the last season of Game of Thrones to get an idea of what I’m talking about.
Of course, Dylan could have refused to write a memoir or given the speech. Or he could write it “authentically” - in this case, utilizing extensive appropriation from works that he must clearly value to craft lyric-like passages that function to convey moods, sentiments, and impressions, even if they do not operate as testimony about historical events. In Macdonald’s case, his status as a comedian aided in the public’s acceptance that his self-described “memoir” is really just a series of jokes instead of a description of what really happened. Macdonald’s memoir surely conveys something about what he thinks, even if it is hard to articulate exactly what that is. One cannot deny that the work exhibits whatever it is that marks Macdonald’s particular brand of authenticity, his comedic je ne sais quoi. Macdonald’s use of jokes successfully acknowledges and provides distance from the duties of the very medium he is writing in, allowing him to do it “his way.”
Jokes, like appropriation, provide a degree of distance between the sayer and what is said that can elicit genuine artistic freedom. Public artists cannot merely neglect their duties or else they risk rejection or dismissal, losing the trust that makes their bending of the rules possible, but they also cannot just do whatever audiences expect - this is also artificial, aesthetically off-putting. It is a matter of mutual recognition - a calibration of trust and expectations between various interested parties, not a one-way demand, either way. Art is a mode of coming to know something about ourselves and the world, a way of being acquainted with the perspectives of others that is not reducible to or understandable on the model of testimony, assertion, or a confession.
Finally, consider the duties associated with Dylan’s commitment to give a speech as the first musician to win the Nobel prize for literature. I see the award ceremony itself as equivalent to a trap-door: a covert tactic to garner publicity and conjure up the figure of “Bob Dylan” and coax him into testifying, into revealing his magician’s secrets - how he crafts those fantastic, transformative rhymes and lines. But again, the demand betrays a lack of artistic sensitivity, like asking Groucho Marx to give a eulogy for the owner of multiple industrial factories. Even more so, Warmuth has revealed that Dylan’s speech for winning Record of the Year at the 1991 Grammy’s also contained appropriated lines, as has every interview he’s given since at least 1966 (consider his responses to the media during his first Australian tour). In all these cases, Dylan is playing a joke on the very institutional and formal structures he must participate in as part of his social role, as well as the navel-grazing audiences that feel entitled to speak on someone’s artistic output merely because they are a popular figure who produced stellar albums some decades ago.
Like a self-deprecating joke about your biggest insecurities, appropriation can be understood as a means of acknowledging and engaging with the public duties associated with authorship without succumbing to their authority. The joke is on anyone that thinks or expects Dylan to just abide by those rules because “them’s the rules.” If you don’t get it, that’s on you.
Fans that loved following Dylan did so in part because it wasn’t clear what he would play. As an act of perfect irony, Dylan switched to singing the same song at the beginning of his live performance, his Winning Things Have Changed that features the lyrics “I’m trying to get as far away from myself as I can” and a chorus which declares: “I used to care, but things have changed.”
We cannot assume that someone’s joke reflects what the jokester actually believes, though jokes certainly give us some insight into the sort of person that they are. Likewise, what an artist appropriates, its origin, the new context, all function to provide audiences with an artistic insight - though, like a joke, it is hard to pin down and explain exactly what it it. Appropriation allows a creator to maintain a self-respecting distance between themselves and the public figure that shares their likeness, accessible to any and everyone through web searches, books, videos, and images, and all its associated expectations and duties. This “distance” is the space where artistic authenticity and integrity can grow because an artist can acknowledge their public role and its associated duties without being determined by them. Appropriation is a method for fleeing the “authority” of the author - that everything stated is to be treated as a confession.
Successful comedians, like Richard Pryor, are such in part because they demonstrate trustworthiness, that even when they make fun of other people, there is a point to it beyond mere superiority or mockery. When we trust that there is a purpose or a point to the work, we are more likely to be responsive to it. When we understand vulnerability as shared rather than exploited, we let them get away with more. But sometimes, perhaps vulnerability itself is not equal. Public artists are already vulnerable, subject to unauthorized books, photos, accusations, and encounters in virtue of being well-known and/or liked. To quote Rorty once again, “art forms like fiction are a safer medium than theory to challenge the authorities…”
Artists do not always deserve our trust, of course. But the joke model shows that discussions about trustworthiness in art are markedly different than those about truth or intention, or honesty - though, again, they are not wholly distinct, either. To joke is to demonstrate that one does not take the subject matter too seriously, and laughter’s infectious nature encourages others not to as well. This can be used for nefarious purposes, but most of it can redeem. A joke done well can imitate what would otherwise offend, but redeems itself through its purpose - employing a racist stereotype in order to laugh at racism with (not at) its victims.
When we joke with others, we transgress the mutual trust that enables successful communication just like we do when we lie, but reestablish it at a higher level, not as a mere means for our own amusement, but to delight in our collective fate as self-assured but ridiculous beings. I trust that you will discern the point of my behavior and laugh, which I do not to deceive you (though I can use humor and jokes to do that, too) - but to bond with you. I want to to “get” it - and hope that you see the value in it as well. It is a spiritual experience, akin to religion and, of course, art. Trust is what enables anyone to express themselves authentically to others, and what supports aesthetically pleasing encounters.
So I end this triology of essays with a cliche - the problem with appropriation is not found in the appropriator, it’s us. When we are upset at an author’s work, what we are doing is revealing that we do not trust them or their work to have valid or redeeming point, that there is nothing for us to gain - the magic trick is all cheap distraction for unredeemable ends. Trust is not independent from evidence and common sense - trustworthiness can be affected by one’s behaviors and statements - we can have genuine debates about whether or not someone is trustworthy that are different from debates about whether they are “right.” But the question about whether we should trust Dylan, Koons, or corporations like Disney shifts the discussion to discussions of responsibility, rather than what’s true and who owns what. Trustworthiness need not equate to honesty, and the truth is only secondary.
I think Dylan is ultimately a jokester, not a thief or a liar - and so what really matters is whether or not we trust him to carry the joke through. Not all jokes work and not all jokes are funny. We can still debate about the things we care about when we care about art, but we do so on slightly different terms. We draw on historical elements to establish trustworthiness, rather than mere empirical facts about the type of artwork or performances that it is. The significant feature that distinguishes whether an artist is appropriating or plagiarizing is whether we trust them and the interesting debate is now whether we should.
I really like this. I feel like I want to reply to many lines and say, 'yes!' .. and just to say, I think you make a lot sense (I will read this again tomorrow, I'm pretty tired, and not in the best way, but I can tell this essay is something I like). There are a lot of things I feel I want to talk to you about, many things at one time.. like I say, I will respond again when I am little more able to. There are also some strange links, coincidences .. with this essay, and something else, that I didn't explain to you previously. It seems kind of linked, in a good way. Best wishes to you,
moth.