Do all artists have references and inspirations, or do the "greats" not use them?

There are surely those who take pride in having "not a single" reference, just as there are those who brag about having countless inspirations. Either way, when it comes to selling your art, marketing inevitably comes into play, and claiming that your work is "not contaminated by references" or, on the contrary, saying that it is "enriched and fortified by countless references from all fields" carries a similar value.

In my opinion, it is only necessary to have a minimum of reference and inspiration; anything extra is just that, extra, and can be better or worse for your work. Your inspirations or references don’t necessarily have to come from your own artistic field; in fact, I think that in some cases, if you only reference or draw inspiration from the same artistic niche, artistic expression can turn into a kind of inbred expression. It is certainly not the most common thing, but I think it is the most enriching thing for an art: the act of drawing inspiration as an artist from a field radically different from your own: a tailor from music, a sculptor from dance, or a musician from cooking. In my experience, every artist who has left a mark on my life has always drawn inspiration from a field different from the one they practice.

It is also important to know the origins and the history of the art you are trying to develop; it is something that should under no circumstances be left aside, since a minimum of knowledge is always necessary. You cannot create any recipe, basic or groundbreaking, without knowing that certain ingredients are not edible and that someone already documented them and did that meticulous work; there is no need for you to go testing each one again just to potentially lose yourself in minutiae and rob time from your creation, or even poison yourself. It is important to use the foundations laid down by our predecessors to be able to build solid work with no cracks in its structural elements. This does not mean that experimentation cannot occasionally reach fundamental levels; it does not mean that from time to time we don’t want to play with the very foundations of our artistic expression, but that should be the pinch of cumin in the stew: no one eats the entire spice jar, right?

Although if we take the principle that nothing is ever new, having a deep knowledge of the artists in your field and of all relevant references can keep you from repeating work already done by another artist. Spontaneous ideas repeat themselves even without ever having had contact with the "original" work, and by keeping those references present, you can circumnavigate them and arrive at different places.

I am not entirely sure if the above is true, or if it is instead better to capture every spontaneous idea that comes to you without inspiration necessarily stemming from your artistic field, hoping that something novel will always emerge by trusting the micro-peculiarities of each person and that entropy will make your work intrinsically and genuinely different from that of the rest of the artists in your field.

Having no references can be simpler or more complicated, depending on how you look at it. In the world we live in, having no visual or auditory inputs becomes almost impossible: advertising is increasingly invasive, social media puts things in front of your eyes whether you like it or not, music is no longer something we have to pay for to consume, and the rise of streaming platforms makes watching series and movies increasingly accessible as a trivial pastime. We eat, shower, and even shit with YouTube videos, music from your Spotify "station," or a series, and we call it "white noise." Perhaps references and inspiration are, in a certain way, being forced upon us in many cases.

There are two types of people in this matter: the ones who do not stubbornly interest themselves in any kind of art and its minutiae, and the ones who do. Those of the first type know in detail every sphere of the creative aspect of each work they consume: the director, the composer, their inspirations, the medium through which the work was distributed, the artist's character, the year or era into which their work fits, and they can even tell what kind of work they are likely to deliver in the future. Then there are those who have no interest in almost anything that is heavily produced; they are artists who live life contemplatively and take references from more everyday matters: a sunset, a sunrise, the details of nature, the corner bakery, their family, etc. In many respects (and for me, it is), this can be considered the purest type of what would define an artist: contemplation of the mundane, introspection, and original work.

I said there were 2 types, but I think, and cannot help but include, a third: there is an artist who sits in the middle, neither at one extreme nor the other, who can find balance. Their interest may focus on something very specific or on a very wide range, but they always keep a certain distance from the reference work and artist so as not to fall into that "pedantry" of knowing the given name of the artist's mother because... well, he is a renowned artist. They look at things from a distance and position themselves in the most advantageous spot for themselves, taking as a reference every small snippet of the referenced artist's complete body of work that can best enrich their own, and then continuing with their own process.

In any case, whether you have clear inspirations or references or not, whether you like to dig more or less deeply into your favorite artists, whether you reflect your references in your work more or less, there will always be someone who says "so-and-so already did that" or "very good, but you are copying artist X," even if you have never had contact with that artist or their work, and that is not necessarily bad for you, nor is it malicious on the part of the person pointing it out. The exact same thing will happen with this publication: there will always be someone who read someone who in turn read another person who had already put forward one or several of the ideas I am presenting here.

In my particular case, I am an artist of the third type; my references are there, but I try not to dig too deep, and I make it clear that I am nowhere near a living encyclopedia or an oracle. To test the point that original and spontaneous ideas are never new, I wrote all of this on my computer disconnected from the internet, in a park, without consulting sources or inspirations. Surely many of my ideas are referenceable; if you know how to reference some of them, let me know.