Page 214 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Innovat on and Im tat on n Commerc al Med a | 1

in new scenarios (like The Amazing Race or The Bachelor). Often such genre cycles emerge
quickly in response to an innovative hit, but flame out from oversaturation of imitations that
fail to capture the pleasures of the original. Certainly many of these reality television imita-
tions were short-lived, pale comparisons to what appealed to viewers initially about Survivor,
but many offered new pleasures and potential ways for audiences to engage with a form of
programming that felt innovative, even if it was developed through imitation. Thus despite
the predictions of critics and many industry executives in 2000, the reality television trend has
persisted for years, becoming a new staple of prime-time programming across the world.

a hisTory oF imiTaTion

While many critics decry today’s media industries as nothing more than a
factory for creating identically shallow cultural products, a more careful look at
the relationship between creativity and imitation complicates this simple con-
demnation. Throughout the history of literature, music, and other art forms,
imitation has been a central facet of creative expression. The early landmarks
of Western culture, Greek drama and poetry, were nearly all retellings of well-
known myths and histories, not original creations emerging from a singular cre-
ative genius. Shakespeare based nearly all of his plays on other dramatic works
and historical myths, making each masterpiece in some way an “imitation” of a
previous work. Classical music is similarly based upon a number of established
“formulas” for structuring works, adhering to dance forms or building upon a
previous composer’s themes and styles. Renaissance art offered “remakes” of the
same Biblical and historical scenes, and the model of artistic apprenticeship en-
couraged artists to learn to imitate and “clone” previous works and styles. In
these examples, artistry arises not from sheer originality, but through the abil-
ity to express preestablished forms and stories in new ways, offering innovation
through combination and alteration, not the singular creation of unique and
unprecedented works.
Popular culture similarly thrives on this logic of imitation yielding creativity.
Popular music legends like the Beatles and the Who built upon preexisting forms
of blues and rock ’n’ roll to offer something new in the way they adapted well-
established models into their own style, later incorporating external influences
like Indian music and operatic structures. Film masterpieces like The Godfather
series revisited the traditions of gangster films, but inflected them with ideas
about American immigration and capitalist business models—just as The So-
pranos reworked The Godfather mythos by incorporating elements of suburban
family drama and psychoanalysis. The entire musical genre of hip-hop is based
upon a process of building upon previous works through the act of sampling, re-
sulting in creative reworkings of an entire history of music through an aesthetic
of remixing, imitation, and commentary. These and many other truly innovative
examples of popular culture offer creativity as synthetic, building upon estab-
lished models and traditions, not a romantic myth of originality detached from
previous cultural works.
Instead of being directly opposed to innovation, imitation might be seen as
a complementary process, present within nearly all modes of creative practice.