I often romanticise about moving out into the desolated forest alone in a small cabin, grow my beard long and become self-sufficient in foods – and there, in my total isolation, create something great. The myth of the isolated genius, the isolated brain, is still alive and not just in my naive fantasies. The C with the circle around, ©, is maybe the most significant symbol of culture production today. but there is also a clash with something else. A Swedish critic stated that the 00′s created a global pop culture, that still feels just as boundless and global to those having a MacBook in their lap, constantly connected to WiFi. The development of the pop culture arena partly depends on the cheap technologies of the production and distribution of music, movies and even literature. The technological development opens up a new use of material which also means a certain new way of thinking.
Post-modernism as a term was used to describe the new movements of art and aesthetics in the 60s, with Andy Warhol’s pop art as a kind of starting point. Here references to previous and contemporary works were given new meaning, and today this has been taken even further to what some speak of as ”mash-up-culture”, ”resample-culture” and ”remix-culture”. The myth of the isolated brain gets challenged and different players on the pop culture arena – critics, audience and artists – seem to re-evaluate what stealing means.
According to the Swedish national encyclopaedia the way of viewing expressions categorised as popular culture has always been shifting. Pop culture in opposition to high culture: superficial and blunting of the intellect and also a threat to the artistic originality. It has also been said that pop culture changes the consumer’s role of being just a reader, listener, viewer or critic to also being an interpreter and participator and consequently part of the artistic process. One might say high culture consigned the audience to inactivity and that pop culture instead advocates a more creative use of the works. Although the pop culture comes stamped with the ©, so this “creative use” is quite limited.
Is it possible to own thoughts, music, culture? The anarchists said “property is theft” and the copyright symbol feels to me both rigid and restrictive. In Helene Hegemann’s postmodern collage-novel ‘Axotl Roadkill’, she examines the borders of plagiarism. To verbally reject the ability to be objective and state that we can only be a collage of already produced material may not be that controversial, but to write a book based on the same principles really is. Hegemann’s book was widely discussed across Europe, “Plagiarism!” some critics shouted, and others talked about the intrusion of the remix culture into the field of literature.
The use of the term ‘remix culture’, describing this ‘copy-paste’ literature may gossip of a new way of viewing this certain phenomenon. What earlier was associated with stealing and failure is now renamed and rethought into the more accepted and arty concept ”remix culture”. Just one of many other examples is Davied Shields novel “Reality Hunger” which includes 618 fragments containing hundreds of quotations of well-knowned authors taken out of context. So, what is clear is that the remix-trend is a strong way of expression right now but it’s also a much more overall-trend.
Some months ago this become clear to me when the great Swedish band This is Head got a lot of Swedish press coverage. One critic wrote for example: ”… Sounds like Yeasayer recorded unreleased songs by U2 …”, another one wrote: ”the debut bear traces of early U2, Peter Gabriel, A Mountain Of One and the Gothenburg band Studio.”, another one: ”At one moment sounds like a modern variety of twisted, really, early U2 or Echo & The Bunnymen … ”, and one wrote: ” Every song stuck in my head and oscillates between slow disco, kraut, post-rock, early U2 and the echoes of late nights at the Manchester club the Hacienda in the 80s.” And this is just a sample, there are many more…
The New York Times-scribe Michiko Kakutani writes with reference to Mr. Lanier, author of the book “You are not a Gadget”, that today the mash-up-artwork is sometimes regarded as “more important than the sources who were mashed”. But at the same time the critics seem to compete in pointing out the sources.
Today’s newspaper critics have a certain obsession with mash-ups, for example in the field of music criticsm, instead of putting the music in a political or social context, the critic construct a coordinate system of other artists and “sounds”. The critic is trying to become a part of the artwork by constructing a sound-context with a constant flow of new references to artists or artworks with ever higher credibility amongst colleagues. According to the remix-critic every pop artist becomes a postmodern remix-artist
In the remix-culture the artist’s use of others’ stuff should be viewed more like borrowing than stealing. Copyright laws, norms and other ways of restricting remixing is seen as “uncreative”. If the isolated brain, “the copyright brain”, was the myth of earlier times, I think “the remix brain”, is the myth of today.
Max Persson
Texten är tidigare publicerad i T O U R I S T magazine www.touristmagazine.co.uk/
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