RG Collingwood has a whale of a time excoriating individualistic conceptions of art.  He recognizes a theological motif behind the post-romantic notion of the isolated artistic genius: “Individualism conceives a man as if he were God, a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power whose only task is to be himself and exhibit his nature in whatever works are appropriate to it.”

He also notes that such an individualistic notion of art is profoundly ahistorical.  Many artists have borrowed quite directly from their predecessors:

“It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet , that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum ; that Handel copied out into his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of Mozart’s G Minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain.”

Not only in production but in display and performance, artists are dependent on others.  This is most obviously true in drama and music.  Collingwood points to the contrast between a dress rehearsal and a the performance of a play.  During a dress rehearsal, “the company are going through the motions of acting a play, and yet no play is being acted,” and this is because “every line, every gesture, falls dead in the empty house.”  Actors know they need an audience to act; Collingwood suggests that theorists of art and drama forget this.  Performance is a dialog.

Even visual artists, whose works are not performed, still require a public.  Collingwood knows “there have been painters who would not exhibit, poets who would not publish, musicians who would not have their works performed,” but says that the artists who have made the “great refusal” are usually second-rate.  ”There has been a lack of genuineness about their work, corresponding to this strain of secretiveness in their character, which is inconsistent with good art.”  When an artist has something to say “he craves to say it in public, and feels that until it has been thus said it has not been said at all.”  The audience even collaborates with the artist in determining what counts as art.  The artist thinks he has produced good work, but “no artist has ever been so conceited as to be wholly taken in by his own pretense.”  Every artist wants his own opinion of his work “echoed on the faces of his audience.”

If influence induces anxiety, artists are one anxious bunch.