I have some influence, want to get high?

"Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange."- Jonathan Lethem

This is an absolutely brilliant concept Lethem presents to us. This quote was taken from his work entitled "The ecstasy of influence." Through out this entire article he is constantly ridiculing the direction this society is headed. We are so obsessed with owning objects, concepts, ideas, trademarks, cartoon characters, logos and everything else in this world we forget to think about the consequences this has. We are limiting the creativity of artists to take the many gifts this world is presenting us and more importantly the progression of our intelligence as a whole. If we cannot use other text, ideas, concepts and art in general without it being labeled plagiarism then won't this cause our artists to hold back. I believe this will. We are too worried about making money to be concerned with what is best for the whole instead of a few individuals. Art is about sacrifice, who cares who gets the credit as long as we advance farther in intelligence and creativity. We have grown so much as a society, and as humans in general that we have explored a vast majority of the ideas and concepts already. The only thing we have left is revision and reinvention. As Lethem put it, we are just trying to make the familiar strange. Yes it is wrong to steal from someone else but when the item is given to you to use, then you mine as well take advantage of it. Why explore territory that others have already written a map for. Try to bring your art some where people haven't been, and if you can't do this on your own let other people's work help you.