Molotov Man + Influence Article

This discussion is one that has interested me greatly. I'm a big fan of work like Humament or like William S Borroughs, where the artist cuts up and recontextualizes another person's words. I've engaged in work like this: photoshop collages, music mash ups, making poetry out of a page of a novel by painting over what I don't want to be read, etc. While these are art forms of recontextualiztion, which exist on the fringes of the artistic world and would probably be approved of by anyone interested in their form, there is a more general discussion of plagiarism and originality that bugs me as an artist. For me, and this is not an opinion or a suspicion but a blatant fact, everything that comes out of an artist has a source. Every story we imagine, every word we put on paper, every vision we see in our minds has a source somewhere else. Just as we are taught language, mathmatics, etc., we must learn creativity through slow absorption of creative methods. I remember a specific film class where the teacher asked where does creativity come from, as if there were a text book answer for it. And indeed, as people were submitting answers, it was clear that he was looking for a right answer, not individual opinions. Someone said from life experiences, the teacher liked this answer. I said from other art, the teacher did not like this answer. To me this simply demonstrates fear, some ingrained aversion to unoriginality that manifests itself in denying the vast influence, or influence in any cpacity, of other artists. As if there's any difference in finding creativity in life experiences or in other art. It's the same thing and certainly for scholars of an art form what has come before and after will be hugely impactful. But the teacher did not want to acknowlegde this fact. Which is funny to me because almost ever screenplay in that class was a genre film, following very strict genre conventions. People are bewildering.