Originals vs. Knockoffs
Culture rewards imitation, so perhaps that's why some artists do it. It's an imitation of the fashion world that operates on knockoffs and copies, and is all about the act of imitation, more so than innovation.
There are three "shades" of imitation: One, the imitation of something that you find interesting--two, the imitation of something that already exists, created to compete with that entity in the same milieu, and three (usually in the fashion industry), the imitation (repetition or replication with slight variation) of your own work or an existing work that has been successful before.
David Bowie never imitated his own work, yet ironically Brian Eno does. Both were aligned with the fashion world at certain junctures for good reasons, as it made them more popular and less esoteric, even though at the core both of them were inclined to be continuously innovative.
Contemporary art and culture always pass through the world of fashion, and probably can't be avoided, and is probably more interesting that it doesn't.
There is an interesting distinction on what is creative writ large, as opposed to simply producing or making something. Merely being productive doesn't involve imagination, but is the essential element of Creativity, where ultimately something is resolved, either in some object or process. If you've successfully resolved something through a creative process, you usually make more of it, and would be no longer innovative, yet creative through its serialization. The fact that something is generative means another one can be cut from the same cloth, without remaking the cloth or the implements that shape it.
This brings to mind the work of Peter Halley, someone that has made mostly the same painting for the past thirty years, yet each one is different in color and geometrical design, is a part of the same series, pertaining to the same subject and philosophies. One small set of constraints made hundreds of works.
Richard Serra makes essentially the same objects out of huge sheets of corten steel. He used to make art in different media, but steel has become his signature medium. Similar to Halley, the work springs from ideation and philosophy. In Serra's case it is language (to fold, to bend, to twist...) that informs the shape. The work seems imitative, but is conceptually unique in each work.
Ultimately it is the ideas and philosophical positions that are the real Creativity, even if it's a knockoff of what you did before, or if it's something totally experimental, which David Bowie gravitated towards at the end of his life. He really never knocked-off anything, and was continually innovating and reinventing, as opposed to repeating, always leaving the edges rough. Nature imitates through adaptation, camouflaging and so on, but we have a capacity or imagination and innovation without being derivative. Bowie, and a few other artists were able to pull this off on all levels. Bowie adapted through characters, who became the innovation source.
