Artistic Inspiration

Art, like philosophy, is not itself about reacting to other people or honoring them, as it is instead about ideas, whether they have to do with storytelling or themes.  When this fact is grasped, it becomes clear that the claim that every artist could not have produced their work--their movie, video game, song, instrumental track, painting, sculpture, or other kind of art--apart from being inspired by someone else's art beforehand is demonstrably untrue.  There is no inherent need to consult or observe other people in order to conceptualize art.  Indeed, to think otherwise lands one in a hopelessly contradictory position.

If every artist needs to be inspired by someone else's art to make their own, what inspired the first artist to create?  The impossibility of infinite regression alone disproves the idea that we can only artistically stand on the shoulders of predecessors, but there is a simpler way to realize the error of this idea.  Without ever conversing with other people, a rational thinker can simply reason his or her way to the fact that artistic ideas themselves, like logical concepts, are accessible prior to any exposure to the works or words of others.  In fact, every storytelling possibility that involves concepts or experiences a person grasps on at least an intellectual level is available to everyone.

No one needs exposure to entertainment that has already been released in order to come up with their own stories, regardless of whether those stories have already been mentally constructed or told by someone else.  Perhaps a story that a given person forms in their mind has already been told (even if the names of characters or objects were different, the plot might be identical), but this would in no way mean that the person who later constructs the story on their own relied on anyone else in the process.  Of course, there are those who would pretend otherwise, but they are the kinds of people who do not understand autonomous thinking.

The myth that everyone merely stands on top of someone else simply glorifies a kind of pseudo-originality that many people may mistake for some kind of significant depth, sometimes even mistaking it for the highest form of creative depth that individuals are capable of.  While people do often build off of other's work in arenas like science, a person's creativity, like their worldview, does not have to be shaped by others.  Not a single person capable of conscious thought is truly incapable of exercising their own intellectual or artistic autonomy, even if everyone around them claims they can do nothing but react to the accomplishments of others or stand on someone else's shoulders.