![are2:
Picasso inspired Super Heroes — Mike Esparza
On the Rise and Fall and Rise of the Internet (part 1 of ?)
This tears it Internet! Mash-up culture, you are going that way and I am going this way.
Listening to Night Ripper in the summer of 2007 as a Production Assistant (a job mostly characterized by your thought processes spinning outward into ever-deeper intellectualizing of the mundane, as well as getting fall down drunk with an assortment of industry characters) in the summer of 2007, I thought, “Whoa, what an insightful recontextualization of our post-Internet/mp3 pop cultural hive mind… that’s also fun to dance to!” However, witnessing the increasingly absurd spiral of remix culture into a new iteration of the “go to Wikipedia and Flickr and randomize an album cover for your fictional band,” where the format of an average post on the Tumblr Radar is a game of “this was high-brow and this was low-brow and now they are mixed together; you can reblog this now (and add the caption ‘Best Evarrr’)” leads one to think maybe the idea of “Everything is a Remix” isn’t all its cracked up to be. Is the democratization of the authorial voice a good thing?
Well, of course it is, or sort of is, or maybe. A recent post on the stimulating Tumblrog Attention Industry likened the opposition of authorial democratization to the endorsement of authoritarian rule; simply, believing not everyone’s voice is equal means believing there should be a figure dictating the value of each person’s voice. It is a funny argument, in that it is nearly impossible to argue with the expression of it, but its practice is infuriating. What is it about this particular practice of a noble concept that actually is the problem?
The discourse surrounding the remix could be part of the problem. The original URL for this post contains the text “artwork-so-awesome-it-will-melt-your-face-off.” That may be one of the most hyperbolic statements one can make (no hyperbole intended). Artwork [that is] so awesome, it will melt your face off: it suggests material so powerful, beaming with such an intense light of artistic truth, it will strip you of everything that has come to represent your presence in this world, suddenly exposing the delicate underlying framework wide open, and though you may protractedly and painfully reassemble and regrow this protective layer, your view of this world will never be the same.
With this, the expectations conjured by this classifier, in mind, does the above piece live up to the standard set?
To be answered in Part 2…](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnknei4pJM1qznd83o1_500.jpg)
are2:
Picasso inspired Super Heroes — Mike Esparza
On the Rise and Fall and Rise of the Internet (part 1 of ?)
This tears it Internet! Mash-up culture, you are going that way and I am going this way.
Listening to Night Ripper in the summer of 2007 as a Production Assistant (a job mostly characterized by your thought processes spinning outward into ever-deeper intellectualizing of the mundane, as well as getting fall down drunk with an assortment of industry characters) in the summer of 2007, I thought, “Whoa, what an insightful recontextualization of our post-Internet/mp3 pop cultural hive mind… that’s also fun to dance to!” However, witnessing the increasingly absurd spiral of remix culture into a new iteration of the “go to Wikipedia and Flickr and randomize an album cover for your fictional band,” where the format of an average post on the Tumblr Radar is a game of “this was high-brow and this was low-brow and now they are mixed together; you can reblog this now (and add the caption ‘Best Evarrr’)” leads one to think maybe the idea of “Everything is a Remix” isn’t all its cracked up to be. Is the democratization of the authorial voice a good thing?
Well, of course it is, or sort of is, or maybe. A recent post on the stimulating Tumblrog Attention Industry likened the opposition of authorial democratization to the endorsement of authoritarian rule; simply, believing not everyone’s voice is equal means believing there should be a figure dictating the value of each person’s voice. It is a funny argument, in that it is nearly impossible to argue with the expression of it, but its practice is infuriating. What is it about this particular practice of a noble concept that actually is the problem?
The discourse surrounding the remix could be part of the problem. The original URL for this post contains the text “artwork-so-awesome-it-will-melt-your-face-off.” That may be one of the most hyperbolic statements one can make (no hyperbole intended). Artwork [that is] so awesome, it will melt your face off: it suggests material so powerful, beaming with such an intense light of artistic truth, it will strip you of everything that has come to represent your presence in this world, suddenly exposing the delicate underlying framework wide open, and though you may protractedly and painfully reassemble and regrow this protective layer, your view of this world will never be the same.
With this, the expectations conjured by this classifier, in mind, does the above piece live up to the standard set?
To be answered in Part 2…
