The Invisible Library

Harpers has a great essay up by Jonathan Lethem. It covers a wide range of topics from artistic appropriation to copyright law:

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.

[…] Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he’d himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.

This is something interesting. Art, all art, is quickly changing. This greybeard novelist strikes us as hoplessly outdated in his puritanism. But it wasn’t that long ago, just a few years, really that this was the law of the Arts. Andy Warhol is still cursed in some artistic circles, because he had the audacity to incorporate popular culture (pitewy!) into his painting! The nerve! Painting is reserved for alegorical murals depicting moral and religious themes, not soup cans and garish silk screen prints of mocie stars!

Today, we’re starting to see the first generation of people raised on pop art. We don’t fear the stigma of borrowing or quoting. We’ve internalized the idea that there’s nothing new and are setting out to explore the used. Pop art and highbrow met at at a party one night and fell in love, now their babies are making a mess of things. Isn’t it beautiful?

Lethem also has something interesting to say about copyright as well. Read it all and borrow the good parts.