The Ecstasy of Influence, a new essay in Harper’s about plagiarism.

Visual, sound, and text collage‚Äîwhich for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)‚Äîbecame explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concr?®te, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronologies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate‚ÄîIgor Stravinsky’s music and Daniel Johnston’s, Francis Bacon’s paintings and Henry Darger’s, the novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged Dickens’s Bleak House to write The Bondwoman’s Narrative), as well as cherished texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their ‚Äúplagiarized‚Äù elements, like Richard Condon’s novels or Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons‚Äîit becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.