The readymades of the internet: can cut & paste be considered art?

by Melville House

Eiffel Tower Replica in Tianducheng, Hangzhou, China.

When Duchamp presented his urinal readymade as art in 1917 it was radical that art could be appropriated rather than made. Now, it seems that the majority of artistic impulses are acted out through appropriation. The blogs we read–or write–point to things, link elsewhere, comment on, note. “I made this” has been replaced by “Check this out.” In the glut of the web, curation is considered as valuable as production. The line between artist and critic is very thin. Both are attempting to draw our attention to something of interest, value, or beauty.

In a very odd and disorienting post at HTMLGiant (‘Wikipedia Vs. Literature”) Kyle Minor muses that “It is not difficult to imagine a novel made of Wikipedia entries, lifted out of context and arranged in any order….The text of the novel might begin:” He then posts the Wikipedia entry for the Eiffel Tower.

In a world of a LOLCats, and YouTube remixes, and the endless reiterations of the internet, I was surprised at how strongly I found Minor’s Wiki-readymade “literature” shocking and unsettling. I don’t know about calling it a “novel” but the author-less text and images of The Eiffel Tower Wikipedia entry are mesmerizing, unexpected, funny, and unfold stylishly. I remember an afternoon, years ago, trolling the web for information on Victor Lustig, the infamous con man who sold the Eiffel tower for scrap metal not once but twice–and yes, the experience rivaled the lure-of-the-deep pleasures of literature. Perhaps I am alone in this, but when I came to the end of Minor’s Eiffel Tower readymade and saw the photographs of the towers many replicas (in Vegas, China, Virginia, Russia, etc.) I felt a slight shiver, like in a horror movie with a twist.

In the comments, fiction-writer Tim Horvath makes the mind-bending argument that Wikipedia falls short as literature, but perhaps only because it concerns things that actually exist.

If the Eiffel Tower didn’t exist, I think this entry would be one of my favorite works of literature in recent memory…What Wikipedia–or any good nonfiction–often reminds me of is the staggering degree of imagination that is required to rival or displace or take a cross-section of or impersonate or resonantly rearrange reality. Not that any of these exhausts what literature does or does best…But I tend to think that what engages us most also by definition engages with reality. Maybe it is a shortcoming on my part, but I never seem to be satisfied reading Wikipedia or its ilk as an end. Instead, the most intriguing info-chunks feel like fodder, something to carry around until the imagination can find something to do with them. Then again, like I said, I wish I could treat this as literature; it is irking me tonight that the Eiffel Tower actually exists.

I apologize for blogging about a comment from another blog that re-posted a Wikipedia entry as a potential work of literature. The levels of meta are appalling. But for some reason this all really blew my mind, and I’m feeling that old dorm-room desire for heady debate. Anyone have any thoughts on all this?

2 Comments

Robert Silva at 12:18 am on January 19, 2011
I think Duchamp made a provocative point with his famous appropriation — but there’s no need for that point to be made again. It’s understood. Art (like language) is fundamentally rearranging things that already exist. I get it. I don’t have a problem with appropriation, but if the appropriation merely says: Look, I’m an appropriation. I can be art too… I’m not so interested. For me, the material has to become transformed in some way — and that doesn’t necessarily mean a word of the text itself has to be changed. I can see a novelist cribbing an encyclopedia entry, for instance, to inject a numbed, generic tone into the middle of a scene that’s written in an entirely different way. For instance:
“Chip squeezed next to his wife to get a look at the ultrasound monitor where their baby would appear. The doctor changed the probe’s position on the transmission gel, and the stippled form of their child arose from the black.
“In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits. Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents. Male gametes are small, motile, and optimized to transport their genetic information over a distance.
“‘Is it a boy or girl?’ his wife asked excitedly, not able to make anything out from the image.
“‘Well, doc?’ Chip asked.”
The second paragraph is of course cobbled from Wikipedia — something Michel Houellebecq did with his new novel, and apparently also did for Platform, although no one seemed to notice (the travel industry sections I think). It provided a stylistic contrast. Contrast, violence, and dissonance are, incidentally, things that collage is really good at. It’s more challenging to use appropriation to create a sense of harmony.
The most seamless use of text-collage I can think of in recent years is the Bob Dylan album “Love and Theft.” Unlike, say, Jonathan Safran Foer’s new coffee table book, it was released without announcing itself as an appropriated work — despite that the quotes in the title were a dead giveaway. Critics had already sung its praises, highlighting its evocation of a fallen South, before someone pointed out that many of its best lines were taken from the memoir of a former Yakuza. It was an issue for a while but the alchemy was so total it was hard to look at the record as anything but a new, vibrant work.
I do think the Internet generation has a different relationship to ownership and plagiarism than the generation before. But I also don’t think things have really changed as much as we think they have. (How many folk songs have their roots in Irish ballads? How many Irish ballads have their roots in other Irish ballads? How many novels use the same three chords as the Gospel of Mark?)
Robert Silva at 12:18 am on January 19, 2011
I think Duchamp made a provocative point with his famous appropriation — but there’s no need for that point to be made again. It’s understood. Art (like language) is fundamentally rearranging things that already exist. I get it. I don’t have a problem with appropriation, but if the appropriation merely says: Look, I’m an appropriation. I can be art too… I’m not so interested. For me, the material has to become transformed in some way — and that doesn’t necessarily mean a word of the text itself has to be changed. I can see a novelist cribbing an encyclopedia entry, for instance, to inject a numbed, generic tone into the middle of a scene that’s written in an entirely different way. For instance:
“Chip squeezed next to his wife to get a look at the ultrasound monitor where their baby would appear. The doctor changed the probe’s position on the transmission gel, and the stippled form of their child arose from the black.
“In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits. Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents. Male gametes are small, motile, and optimized to transport their genetic information over a distance.
“‘Is it a boy or girl?’ his wife asked excitedly, not able to make anything out from the image.
“‘Well, doc?’ Chip asked.”
The second paragraph is of course cobbled from Wikipedia — something Michel Houellebecq did with his new novel, and apparently also did for Platform, although no one seemed to notice (the travel industry sections I think). It provided a stylistic contrast. Contrast, violence, and dissonance are, incidentally, things that collage is really good at. It’s more challenging to use appropriation to create a sense of harmony.
The most seamless use of text-collage I can think of in recent years is the Bob Dylan album “Love and Theft.” Unlike, say, Jonathan Safran Foer’s new coffee table book, it was released without announcing itself as an appropriated work — despite that the quotes in the title were a dead giveaway. Critics had already sung its praises, highlighting its evocation of a fallen South, before someone pointed out that many of its best lines were taken from the memoir of a former Yakuza. It was an issue for a while but the alchemy was so total it was hard to look at the record as anything but a new, vibrant work.
I do think the Internet generation has a different relationship to ownership and plagiarism than the generation before. But I also don’t think things have really changed as much as we think they have. (How many folk songs have their roots in Irish ballads? How many Irish ballads have their roots in other Irish ballads? How many novels use the same three chords as the Gospel of Mark?)