Cutting Across Media

The contributors to Cutting Across Media focus on collage and appropriation art, exploring the legal ramifications of such practices in an age when private companies can own culture using copyright and trademark law. Examining the intersections of the popular and the avant-garde, each essay is implicitly or explicitly concerned with the politics of appropriation art and other forms of collage that intervene in popular media discourses. Cutting Across Media features some important, eye-popping archival pieces, along with new essays by leading academics, critics, essayists, and artists. It scrutinizes and in some instances illustrates forms of collage and appropriation art such as audio mash-ups, remixed news broadcasts, literary collage, visual collage, and plagiarism-as-art, as well as culture jamming, pranks, and billboard alteration. Among the contributors to the collection 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 1992 for sampling U2 in a satirical sound collage. Contributors: Craig Baldwin; David Banash; Marcus Boon; Jeff Chang; Joshua Clover; Lorraine Morales Cox; Lloyd Dunn; Pierre Joris; Douglas Kahn; Rudolf Kuenzli; Rob Latham; Jonathan Lethem; Carrie McLaren; Kembrew McLeod; Negativland; Philo T. Farnsworth; Davis Schneiderman; Siva Vaidhyanathan; Gabor Valyi; Eva Hemmungs Wirten