Art & Conceptual Parentage

In the West, intellectual properties are commonly wrested from their creators to be debased and prostituted. It was pretty cool to witness by contrast the return of Tetsuya Nomura (director), Yoshinori Kitase (producer), Kazushige Nojima (writer), Nobuo Uematsu (composer) to FFVII in 2020.

This because we do not believe works of art or intellectual properties can be indiscriminately passed between different creators like cheap whores. Conceptual parentage permeates a made thing. Art consists (in its formal element) in a conception (vs the expression thereof[i]) which subsist in and remains on the “side of the [artist’s] mind”, no matter the expression of the same in matter[ii]. A conception cannot be passed between creators, as an object “contemplated in the mind, born of and nourished by the mind [and] living by the life of the mind”[iii]. The attempt will produce something altogether different (as the irreducibly individual conceptions in the mind of separate creators ensures), despite even radical superficial similarities.

References
[i] A & S 193 (https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Scholasticism-Jacques-Maritain/dp/1944418105)

[ii] A & S 14

[iii] A & S 90