Aram Sinnreich sez, "Truthdig.com just published an excerpt from my new book, Mashed Up: Music, Technology & the Rise of Configurable Culture.
The book is about how the legal, ethical and aesthetic battles over mash-up culture and sample-based music prefigure larger arguments over the shape of society in the networked age. It also argues that some of the answers that DJs have found might point the way towards a new social structure for the 21st century.
This particular excerpt is about the blurring line between 'artist' and 'audience,' and the legal and political implications of the newly gray area in between."
The biggest myth of all is the Romantic notion that artists somehow create their work uniquely and from scratch, that paintings and sculptures and songs emerge fully-formed from their fertile minds like Athena sprang from Zeus. Running a close second is the myth that only a handful of us possess the raw talent – or the genius – to be an artist. According to this myth, the vast majority of us may be able to appreciate art to some degree, but we will never have what it takes to make it. The third myth is that an artist's success (posthumous though it may be) is proof positive of his worthiness, that the marketplace for art and music functions as some kind of aesthetic meritocracy.
Of course, these myths fly in the face of our everyday experience. We know rationally that Picasso's cubism looks a lot like Braque's, and that Michael Jackson sounds a lot like James Brown at 45 RPM. We doodle and sing and dance our way through our days, improvising and embellishing the mundane aspects of our existence with countless unheralded acts of creativity. And we all know that American Idol and its ilk are total B.S. (very entertaining B.S., of course!). Each of us can number among our acquaintance wonderful singers, dancers, painters or writers whose creations rival or outstrip those of their famous counterparts, just as each of us knows at least one beauty who puts the faces on the covers of glossy magazines to shame.
I've admired Aram's work since we taught together at USC. I've read part of a prepub of this book (it's adapted from Aram's PhD thesis) and it's fascinating stuff.
'Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture' (Truthdig)
Mashed Up: Music, Technology & the Rise of Configurable Culture (Amazon)
(Thanks, Aram!)
