the pernicious and silly term "influence"

i don’t mean to sidetrack this into an analysis of andy warhol though

also sund4r i think you do understand my point, inasmuch as i’m just restating what mark is saying. the agency is in the person checking the horoscope and choosing to follow it’s dictates, not in the astrologer or the stars and planets themselves. could make similar point abt the writer’s routine of picking up the books every day or the routine warhol
followed for lunch (that the agency is not in the book or the lunch itself)

ftr he painted all 32 delicious varieties extant in 1962 and revisited chicken noodle in 1986

well there you go

So you think in a world where Warhol had no interest in Campbell's, he would have just made a bunch of paintings of Coke cans or another product? Don't know how you can say that for sure, but yeah no point debating the hypothetical.

you’re fucking with me

Nope, still not!

https://whitney.org/collection/works/3253

^^ ??

But I mean, that's a different painting, isn't it? Obviously he didn't think they were so interchangeable in meaning as to not be both worth doing

Yes, exactly (that's actually why I said Coke cans - b/c he was interested in Coke, too - though I see how it may have have muddied the point)

I feel icky stooping to the copy-past-from-Wikipedia level, but here's some shit from there:

Several stories mention that Warhol's choice of soup cans reflected his own avid devotion to Campbell's soup as a consumer. Robert Indiana once said: "I knew Andy very well. The reason he painted soup cans is that he liked soup." He was thought to have focused on them because they composed a daily dietary staple. Others observed that Warhol merely painted things he held close at heart. He enjoyed eating Campbell's soup, had a taste for Coca-Cola, loved money, and admired movie stars. Thus, they all became subjects of his work. Yet another account says that his daily lunches in his studio consisted of Campbell's Soup and Coca-Cola, and thus, his inspiration came from seeing the empty cans and bottles accumulate on his desk.

In the great PBS American Masters on Warhol, it said that he had Campbell's soup virtually every day as a kid.

i posted that fact myself!

don't think his devotion to Campbell's soup or Coca-Cola represented influence, though. more just subjects to impose his ideas on. I think Duchamp was a godfather to him in that sense

I think this is an interesting discussion about Warhol but I also think people are kind of deliberately missing what is typically meant by "influence" so that they can sustain a challop.

I would definitely not say the soup itself "influenced" Warhol. It may have helped inspire him or served as an emotional touchpoint. I would probably say that the graphic design of the Campbells soup label and other commercial design (a field he actually engaged in before he was Andy Warhol) "influenced" him though.

people are kind of deliberately missing what is typically meant by "influence" so that they can sustain a challop.

definition of a challop imo

also good discussion but i hate the premise. everyone is influenced by everything. no idea's original. yawn.

i mean, really. can we just get back to the music?

but maybe i'm missing the point. wouldn't be the first time.

I would probably say that the graphic design of the Campbells soup label and other commercial design (a field he actually engaged in before he was Andy Warhol) "influenced" him though

his subjects reflected his commercial design experience, but he drew from the history of art and his intention and style transcended that

Late Great: sorry, didn't read back, so missed that. Hope you've seen the American Masters episode, it's really great.

I would probably say that the graphic design of the Campbells soup label and other commercial design (a field he actually engaged in before he was Andy Warhol) "influenced" him though.

To be clear, this is exactly what I was talking about – how he was influenced artistically by the cans – I didn’t mean to imply that the liquid itself influenced him to become a chef or something.

I also didn’t see this as a challop – I thought it would be totally noncontroversial to say that Warhol was influenced by Campbell Soup cans, but maybe I truly am “missing what is typically meant by ‘influence’” (if so, it’s not deliberate!)

I was responding more to the lategreat post you were responding to than to you, the challop being more the whole "influence is a meaningless term" thing.

Also (again in response to lategreat) I think it of course matters that he painted Campbells Soup cans and not Progresso cans. The cans are visually/graphically totally different from Progressive cans, they have different text, they have different resonance. To assume otherwise is to reduce the art to whatever you think the "idea" behind the art is.

also sund4r i think you do understand my point, inasmuch as i’m just restating what mark is saying. the agency is in the person checking the horoscope and choosing to follow it’s dictates, not in the astrologer or the stars and planets themselves. could make similar point abt the writer’s routine of picking up the books every day or the routine warhol
followed for lunch (that the agency is not in the book or the lunch itself)

― the late great, Thursday, 15 September 2022 23:41 (yesterday) link

ok but we're talking about artists, not astrology. surely there is some 'meaning' when an artist happens to attract the attention of many artists who follow them. the meaning is never static & depends on context, but its not meaningless. 'influence' is not a one way street. and in many cases, the choices artists make in terms of who they allow to 'influence' them for lack of a better word runs counter to the conventional wisdom of ie critics at a given time. I feel like typically when someone mentions 'influence' they are pointing to artistic agency

The cans are visually/graphically totally different from Progressive cans, they have different text, they have different resonance. To assume otherwise is to reduce the art to whatever you think the "idea" behind the art is.

Dang – this nails the point that was rattling around in my head, so much better than I could have expressed it.

Those posts about what Andy Warhol would have painted if he had eaten something else for breakfast is the most inadvertently funny thing I've read on ILM. You guys !

not sure i buy this! you could make the same argument about people who check the horoscope every day - surely they wouldn’t do it, if the stars didn’t influence their lives?

BUT WAIT, you say! surely the act of checking a horoscope every day influences what you do? well, yes! everything you do has some effect on your future. andy warhol ate a can of campbell’s tomato soup every day at lunch (it was his favorite, and he loved routine). did campbell’s soup influence his work?

so i think the book reading probably does influence his work, but maybe not in the sense that the results would be different if we swapped the books for different books. and are the books influencing the writer, or is the writer … influencing himself? and why is the “picking a book” routine more of an influence on the writer than his morning toilet routine, or midday ham sandwich routine, or late night nose picking routine?

i’m not saying i have the answers to any of these questions, but i think they are interesting (particularly whether the influence is in the book vs the routine, cf andy’s tomato soup) and i think we start answering them with “use other words” vs just saying “come on that’s absurd, the ham sandwich has no influence on writing”

― the late great, Thursday, September 15, 2022 3:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

iiuc your argument is about the inherent arbitrariness in drawing a boundary among all aspects of life, and saying "opening a book to a random page is influence, eating soup is not"

but if you ask me to use other words other than influence, what's stopping you from applying this same argument to the other words i choose?

if, instead of talking about influences, i simply talked about what books my friend was reading while writing his novel, you could ask "why stop at books? what about the receipt stapled to the chinese takeout he got the night before? what about the text message from his mother?"

beyond some kind of kantian transcendental deductive derivation of categories, there's no fundamental principle that tells you where to draw the line

i don't think my rule is so arbitrary tho. my suggestion was to take people's word for it. people have a private insight into their own creative process; if they describe something as influence, i trust they are referring to something concrete they feel

if andy warhol said he was influenced by campbell's soup, would i believe him? i'd probably think he was being facetious. but the album 'strawberry jam' by animal collective was influenced by a jam packet served on an airplane, and i 100% believe that

i personally have the feeling of having influences. i'm not an artist, so they're pretty easy to trace to hobbies i had while i was a teenager. specific periods when a certain mental pathway was forged into muscle memory. when i doodle, i typically draw an ugly face in a daniel clowes/charles burns style, because when i was a teen i drew indie comics and practiced at that style. if i pick up a guitar, i'll do a particular dissonant bending of the high strings i got from learning pixies guitar solos. there were other things i read or listened to but never absorbed as influences. because my skills are so limited, it's really easy to see where influences begin and end. for better artists, it's harder to discern, but i wager it's the same fundamentally

i actually think you have to operate at a very high level, artistically, to be influenced by mundane things like strawberry jam. that level of abstraction is impressive to me

horoscope was supposed to be a gotcha but it's a great example. i once had a friend, someone i'd considered really intelligent, who was single and lonely for years after the end of a major long-term relationship. at one point she started dating this sweet charming guy, all her friends loved him. but she broke it off and told us "i just can't date another sagittarius"

"people have a private insight into their own creative process; if they describe something as influence, i trust they are referring to something concrete they feel"

i think this is true and i like these types of story -- i also think they shd use other words = remain at the level of the concrete specifics of what they feel (interesting! important! sometimes!) and not just let them be smooshed up as "influence" into a pigpile of other stories without specificity (which is why we tend not to listen to them)

Influence has built-in vagueness. For example, in a chess game an unusually early advanced piece may have an influence over the entire board that both players need to take account throughout the game, but it would be tedious and impossible to put this into exact words. And it remains a (useful) shorthand term.

(In that context)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcwz8-EfFYE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgDhlmf91pg

Jerry Lewis, The King of Comedy: "A man said--listen to me...listen to me--a man said something very profound some years ago, which I later originated."

Anticipatory Plagiarists to thread!

lolling at the image of thousands of yuppie apartments with poster prints of this in their entryway

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/N~oAAOSwvxBd9YIA/s-l1600.jpg

Make It Progresso or Frigid People Really Make It

I think I feel about 'interesting' the way mark does about 'influence'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLdKU4JCYqg

Revolver: Both 'Roxanne' and 'Can't Stand Losing You' feature another Police hallmark: pounding out the choruses and smoothing out the verses, which Nirvana and a lot of nineties band copied.

Sting: Yes, as a matter of fact, we were trying to influence Nirvana. That was the whole idea. I said, 'I'm going to influence this band in Seattle. I know the members are only about seven years old at the moment, but still..."

sting gets it

The best comeback of his career.

influence aside, does Revolver really think the Police invented quiet/loud?

franz josef haydn said, 'i know the members are only about minus two hundred years old at the moment..."

Reminds me of a trope Marcello Carlin often uses in his writing: "Meanwhile, in East Wickham, a nine-year old Cathy Bush was listening carefully to this album..."; but he may be right! And it's certainly not absurd to think that any of Nirvana would have heard "Roxanne" or "Message in a Bottle" at 11 or 12?

It's a lot more interesting to consider the Police in relation to Nirvana than talking about "More Than a Feeling" again.

Sting actually made me laugh.

he gets it!

Clearly this old nursery rhyme is the OG quiet/loud song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fovP6lAUVP0

Sting's statement is fine and Mark S's enjoyment is agreeable, but Sting's statement does not provide any disproof whatever of the phenomenon of 'influence'.

I'd be very doubtful really that Nirvana were 'copying' The Police.

But if they were, then does the 'copy' concept (which is fine) contradict the 'influence' concept?

To me, not really.

As I've probably said all along - all these things exist and coexist, they're all fine, but in critical discourse it's better to use them thoughtfully, precisely and not excessively.