Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law

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In this collection of essays, leading academics, critics, and artists historicize collage and appropriation tactics that cut across diverse media and genres. They take up issues of appropriation in the popular and the avant-garde, in altered billboards and the work of the renowned painter Chris Ofili, in hip-hop and the compositions of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and in audio mash-ups, remixed news broadcasts, pranks, culture jamming, and numerous other cultural forms. The borrowing practices that they consider often run afoul of intellectual property regimes, and many of the contributors address the effects of copyright and trademark law on creativity. Among the contributors are the novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem, the poet and cultural critic Joshua Clover, the filmmaker Craig Baldwin, the hip-hop historian Jeff Chang, the ’zine-maker and sound collage artist Lloyd Dunn, and Negativland, the infamous collective that was sued in 1991 for sampling U2 in a satirical sound collage. Cutting Across Media is both a serious examination of collage and appropriation practices and a celebration of their transformative political and cultural possibilities.Contributors
Craig Baldwin
David Banash
Marcus Boon
Jeff Chang
Joshua Clover
Lorraine Morales Cox
Lloyd Dunn
Philo T. Farnsworth
Pierre Joris
Douglas Kahn
Rudolf Kuenzli
Rob Latham
Jonathan Lethem
Carrie McLaren
Kembrew McLeod
Negativland
Davis Schneiderman
David Tetzlaff
Gábor Vályi
Warner Special Products
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén