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219 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
“It is out of the madness of God, in the Old Testament, that there emerges what we, now, would recognize as the ‘real’; his perceived insanity is its very precondition.”The real is indeed insane. Whether art intends to portray this insanity or ameliorate it as a comforting fetish is up to the artist. Art is not an exception to the general insanity. The only thing it ultimately can do is contest itself, assembling and disassembling images to form new images, claiming originality for the collage it produces. Great artists establish their images as models for future misinterpretation.
“What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library.”And he certainly has a point. This is a new, perhaps technologically inevitable, way in which to value art; not through the prices set at auction or the royalties collected, but by the effect it has on world culture through direct mass distribution.