Alchemy of Ideas

A few days ago, I watched Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child documentary and one of my favorite quotations from Basquiat involved the. rethinking of influence and borrowing from the past, which everyone does. He described it as more of a transformation of ideas, taking old ideas and putting them in a new context.

Basquiat said, “If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve got to realize that influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.” It reminds me of this quotation from Dave Macklovitch: “There’s no such thing as repetition because every time you repeat something, you’re repeating it in a new context.”