The Creative Hat Tip

If you write an article you attribute sources. If you cook your grandmother’s famous deep-fried Mars Bars you give the old girl props. If you forward a link you hat tip the finder. But creatives seem reluctant to indicate where they got their inspiration from.

Granted, inspiration is nebulous to even the most fastidious artist. You’d have to be a pop-culture genius to parse all the sources influencing Kill Bill. At least Tarantino tipped his hat for fellow film geeks. But there’s no doubt that most artists’ ego resist denying originality.

A particularly egregious example of creative plagiarism and the inspiration for this post is the music clip for Kanye West’s “All of the Lights”, which lifts the brilliantly epilepsy-inducing open titles from Gaspar Noe’s “Enter the Void”. Go to 1 minute 10 seconds for the open title rip-off

Director Hype Williams puts his name front and centre, but can’t devote a millisecond of copy to hat tip Gaspar Noe or designer Tom Kan. An artists’ ego might resist the creative hat tip, but the internet makes it easy to figure out the giants’ shoulders they’re stomping all over.