Read & Reflect #4

I started with the Ted Talk this week and ended up spending four days watching talk after talk.  I find them fascinating.  I personally don't care much for fashion, but thought it was very interesting that designers had to work harder to create uniquely branded looks and not just the brands themselves.
The reading from Rosen was fascinating, but I had to continually Google names and such to better understand the full meaning of his words.  As a whole I can appreciate and incorporate the information into my future classroom. 
As I watched the video, Remix, I was practically elated.  At the conclusion of the film it felt like I had just watched my favorite movie for the first time.  Every other thought or concern I had had that day was wiped from my mind as if I was in shock.  I started thinking about appropriation and Mary Franco's presentation on age appropriate lesson plans I'd seen more than a year before.  If I take an image of artwork someone else made, change it in three significant ways and dub it my artwork how is that different than remixing music.
They say nothing in art is new anymore, no idea or way of thinking or representation, everything has been done before.  You as an artist can only make it bigger, better, etc.  So does that mean every piece of artwork I've ever made is copyright infringement??? NO!  Remix and Johanna both pointed out that you can't copyright creativity.  The creative ingenuity that Girl Talk exhibits on stage while preforming and creating his "music" could never in a million years have been created by the original musicians.  Artist like Glitch Mob, Ruckus Roboticus, Wax Tailor, Blackmill, and Skrillex (just to name a few of my favorites) creating Dubstep music, which to me is very similar to Mashups or Funk, are creating new music built upon the knowledge and musical stepping stones which came before them. 
Images of Duchamp "Fountain" and other Dadaist pieces started coming to mind and I wanted to see how student's creative process might be changed by listening to artist like Girl Talk or Skrillex.  But although Dubstep can be found on sites like Pandora would I find Girl Talk as well or artist of the Brazilian Funk genre.  Is there a difference in artist like Girl talk and Skrillex as far as copyright laws are concerned.  Both artists are building with what has come before. If I played these artist in my classroom would I be feeding into the delinquency of our nation or helping to create a stronger one.  Would I be able to find said music legally?
What can you appropriate in art; an exercise in taking existing pieces of art and changing them in at least three ways to make it your own. Clear and concise guidelines would be needed but this activity would be a lot of fun if students were to add a musical element to there pieces reflecting what they were listening to as they worked. 
An art historical lesson could be made about looking into the history or Dadaism or who created some of the first assemblages.  What was the inspiration behind the artist choices and how might the student use the same inspiration to create pieces of their own.