Culture Chronicle

Technology Changes How Art is Created and Perceived
Los Angeles Times - June 6, 2010
By Neal Gabler

Through the Internet, video games, YouTube, Twitter, et al, original art is sampled and re-envisioned by anyone who can master the computer skills. But where does art end and amateurism begin?

It used to be so simple. A book had an author; a film, a screenwriter and director; a piece of music, a composer and performer; a painting or sculpture, an artist; a play, a playwright. You could assume that the work actually erupted more or less full-blown from these folks. In addition, the book, film, musical composition, painting or play was a discrete object or event that existed in time and space. You could hold it in your hands or watch or listen to it in a theater or your living room. It didn't really change over time unless the artist decided to revise it or a performer reinterpreted it.

Well, not any more. For years now numerous observers have described the process by which the very fundaments of art are changing from the old principle of one man, one creation. Songs have remixes through which anyone so disposed can alter the original music; videos have mash-ups that use footage to reposition and change the original meaning; the visual arts have communal canvases and websites; poetry has Flarf, which allows one to generate verse from random words; , and books have collages, like David Shields' recent "Reality Hunger," which was assembled entirely, paragraph by paragraph, out of other authors' words. Recombinant art is the rage.

What all these forms have in common is appropriation and a sense of rampant collaboration in which every work of art is simply raw material for anyone who decides to put his or her imprint on it, which then allows someone else to put his imprint on the imprint, which allows still someone else to put his imprint on the imprint on the imprint, and so on ad infinitum. You could call it Wiki-Culture after its prototype, Wikipedia, because like Wikipedia, it is a new form of democratic cultural construction in which everyone can make a contribution. For the full article, click here