OK, Just So We’re Clear

Here’s a small doc about Bill Shannon:

Here’s RJD2’s promo for Work It Out:

And here’s the new Visa Ad:An anonymous commenter on the next post down has pointed out the provenance of the ad with the sentence ‘plagiarism reaches a new low’.

I wish I could arsed to get into the whole stealing/borrowing/inspiration debate AGAIN, but I can’t.

You have all the brilliant geniuses who say ‘lesser artists borrow; great artists steal’ (Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Sir Thomas Beecham and others.) and then God, who says ‘thou shalt not steal’.

But the thing here is that Saatchis have used Bill Shannon. They haven’t ripped him off. They’ve said we like what you’ve done in your many YouTube clips and thought it might work for Visa. Here, have some money and come to Buenos Aires for a few days.

Just as Tom and Walt liked that picture with the horses on the waves and Ben and Matt liked Der Lauf Der Dinge. But this is morally ‘better’ than those because the original guy got paid and will now be even more famous.

I take my hat off to those who produce true originality (if such a thing is possible), but we can’t, as an entire industry, say that what we do must never, ever have been done before in any form. Visa did exactly what these ads did. I don’t remember any uproar at the time.

Oh no. I have got into the bloody debate again.

Bollocks to it all. We’re never going to agree.

Nice ad. And why does he get such cool crutches? When I broke my leg (both times) I got those crappy grey ones from the NHS.