If you want to glimpse the future of art, tag along one day with Cory Arcangel as he plows through the history of technology. Every few weeks Arcangel, a 25-year-old artist based in Brooklyn, spends a day trolling in Goodwill stores and junk shops for the sort of detritus that our society used to call high tech, like Nintendo NES videogame cartridges circa 1985. Then he takes them back to his studio for a little torture with a soldering iron.
When he's done, Super Mario isn't so super after all. Arcangel's artworks include Super Mario Clouds, a piece in the current Whitney Biennial that consists of a hacked Nintendo cartridge that projects only the blue sky and gently floating clouds that used to form the visual backdrop for the little Italian plumber's heroic antics. Another piece, called Naptime, shows Mario dreaming of psychedelic visions. Arcangel's I Shot Andy Warhol, currently on view at the Guggenheim, is the result of a hacked Hogan's Alley cartridge in which the Nintendo game's shooting gallery of snarling denizens has been replaced by Warhol, the Pope, the rap artist Flava Flav and the fried-chicken icon Colonel Sanders.
A continent away, holed up in his suburban Los Angeles house, Brian Burton is looking for his next project. Burton is a DJ who goes by the name Danger Mouse, and last winter he thought it would be cool to use Acid Pro, a $400 (U.S.) music-software package to mix The Black Album by the rapper Jay-Z with The White Album by the Beatles into a so-called mash-up. Working non-stop for two weeks, he produced The Grey Album, which quickly became one of the most sought after pieces of media on the Internet, with more than 100,000 copies downloaded on a single day in February.
Separated by thousands of miles and decades of technological advances, Arcangel and Burton are together at the forefront of a new kind of culture. Rather than creating something out of raw paints and canvas or chisels on untouched stone, or coaxing sounds from a musical instrument with their own hands, their preferred medium is premade art, prerecorded music, and other media that already exist.
"All culture is recombinant. All cultural works build themselves out of pieces of other works," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the undergraduate program in communication studies at New York University. "This is what artists have been doing since we've had artists."
Shakespeare borrowed Danish and Scottish legends, Leonard Bernstein borrowed from Shakespeare, and Homer's story of Troy (which has now been made into a $175-million [U.S.] film without anyone in Hollywood cutting a cheque to Homer's descendants) was itself based on myth. Warhol and other pop artists appropriated commercial icons for their paintings. Musicians record cover versions of their favourite songs as tributes to their forebears.
The difference now is that artists — professionals and amateurs alike — are taking existing works and messing with their content and expression to create something new. If you want a name for the phenomenon, you could look at its insistence on the rights of the individual and call it democratic art, or focus on its wholesale limb-splicing and call it FrankenArt, in a nod to Mary Shelley's science-fiction horror story (which was, as it happens, based on the true story of a scientist living in Burg Frankenstein, but that may be neither here nor there).
Marcel Duchamp did something like this when he drew a mustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa. Last year, England's enfants terribles Jake and Dinos Chapman, to the horror of the art world, marked up Goya's Disasters of War prints with images of clown heads and puppy-dog heads. But most of the new art is being driven by the ability to reshape with technology.
"What we're seeing now is the expansion and extension of these habits through electronic means, and artists are making sure that the medium itself is part of the message," says Vaidhyanathan, whose new book The Anarchist in the Library grapples with how the Internet affects the struggle between oligarchy and anarchy.
