I advocate stealing (not in the conventional sense)

It's my first post on this blog, and I'm wondering what to write. So I thought I'd start with showing this interesting manifesto by independent film director Jim Jarmusch.

From Today and Tomorrow

In the art world particularly, new works may be provocative but hardly shocking or groundbreaking as almost everything has been tried and done before. This does not mean that works with an art-historical basis are less worthy of admiration. Picasso brashly churned out his own versions of Manet's paintings; Francis Bacon took everything from a film still of Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin to a Rembrandt painting to stop-motion photography as his inspiration. In fact, there's an exhibition in Paris now displaying Picasso's paintings and the Manet originals that inspired them together.

Importantly, these artists did not blindly mimic but used the existing material as springboards for the development of their own work. Anyone who has seen Picasso's work will know that his style is vastly different from Manet's. It is the formal harmony of Manet's paintings that he learned from and adapted, developing a new style of his own comprising disjointed forms in compositional tension and excitement. As quoted, "It's not where you take things from- it's where you take them to."

I wonder what will capture my imagination today?