(Michele M.F./Wikimedia)

Doret is a graphic artist and typographer with a prolific body of work spanning 40 years. He’s designed everything from rock ‘n’ roll album covers to postage stamps to several of his own fonts. 

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In a talk hosted by Maker City LA last Thursday night called "Michael Doret: Inspiration, Influence & Iconic Letterforms," Doret explained that his design inspiration comes from the already-designed world around him. “What I do is the result of everything that surrounded me growing up,” he said.

Doret openly admitted that he’s appropriated each and every piece of his work from something that already exists. In doing so, he provokes a conversation on changing attitudes toward creativity and inspiration in the contemporary art world. 

Doret’s style, he said, was born directly out of his childhood experiences growing up at Coney Island in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but he didn’t discover the depth of its influence on him until adulthood. 

Looking at a picture of himself on the Coney Island boardwalk years later was an “Aha!” moment: “I realized that this was my missing link—my Rosetta Stone,” he explained. “The cacophony of bright colors, lettering, sights, sounds and smells…acted on a subconscious level and directed me aesthetically.”

For instance, he was “intrigued” at a young age by the logo on Coney Island’s steeplechase building. He conjured up that smiling face, whose ambiguous grin can read both friendly and “sinister,” on the cover he made for KISS’ Rock and Roll Over album in 1976. 

“Looking back, it has an undeniable amusement park feel,” he said of the cover. He concluded that Coney Island has lingered, however subconsciously, in the “back of his mind” for over 50 years. 

But on some level, this is the type of revelation we expect from artists. We expect that their ideas come from a deep beyond, that their ability to reach into their subconscious and create something new is what makes them an artist. That external inspiration, if it exists at all, is indirect.

Much less common is the way Doret openly and deliberately imitates the work of other designers.

To explain how he made the lettering for a poster, Doret showed his audience a photo of a sign he once saw. “I loved this,” he said, “so when the first opportunity to rip it off came, I took it.”

Indeed, the name of his famous font “Deliscript” is a “nod” to Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, whose store sign was the basis of Deliscript’s letterforms. The letters are copies of the retro script on the Canter’s sign.

One might think this would cause strife with the Canter family, seeing how Doret ripped off the sign they made into a very lucrative product (lucrative for him, that is). 

But what really happened is just the opposite. A few years ago, Doret said, the great-granddaughter of the original Canters was looking for someone to paint a logo on her new Canter’s food truck. She found Doret’s work through a Google search and was flattered that he took inspiration from her family’s sign. 

She then contracted him to paint the side of her new food truck in Deliscript.

So while Doret’s Deliscript is a copy, it’s a joyful copy: a celebration of designers past and their influence on today. 

Doret’s openness about this type of influence and appropriation seems remarkable, because for hundreds of years we’ve been coached to value artists based on the originality of what they create. If something is original, it’s authentic; if it’s authentic, it’s valuable.

Over the past fifty or so years, however, art has undergone a seismic shift toward a new definition of creativity and inspiration. Doret and others like him who embrace others’ influence on their own work are redefining what it means to be an artist.

The idea most famously appeared in Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay “Death of the Author,” a cornerstone of postmodern art criticism. Writing about literature and art interchangeably, Barthes says that “The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author,” and that the author’s sole job has traditionally been to create an original idea. The author/artist “is in the same relation … to his work as a father to his child.” 

Barthes says that postmodern authors and artists “[desacralize] the image of the Author” through a new mode of art making in which artists, instead of birthing ideas on their own, consciously derive new works from ideas that already exist. The art world, then, is a “multidimensional space in which a variety of writings [and artworks], none of them original, blend and clash.”

The Internet, in particular social media and the blogosphere, has made Barthes’ idea of a redefined artist more relevant than ever. Never before has it been so easy to find, grab and reinterpret existing artwork. Look at the meme, an entire art form based on the appropriation of existing imagery, for proof. To the Tumblr generation, copying is a celebratory act. 

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With that changing attitude comes an increased appreciation for Doret’s method of work. Doret and others like him are looking to change not only the identity of the artist, but the very definition of creativity. 

Doret explained that art creation to him is all about “mixing metaphors”: fusing memories and influences into new combinations. The inspiration may all be old, but the blend is new.

In his recent TED Talk, Alan Palomo, otherwise known as indie musician Neon Indian, talks about these shifting ideas of art and its purpose. He concludes with a quote from Jim Jarmusch that I’ll end with as well:

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination….select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic…In any case, remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.’”

Contact Senior Arts Editor Gigi Gastevich here.