Reality Hunger (32 page)

Chris Moukarbel, who was sued by Paramount Pictures over a twelve-minute video based on a bootleg Oliver Stone film script about 9/11, had another video in a New York gallery exhibition that sought to marry politics and art. This one was created from film shot in the process of making the video that led to the lawsuit. Paramount filed suit in United States District Court in Washington, saying that Mr. Moukarbel’s original video,
World Trade Center 2006
, infringed on the copyright of the screenplay for Mr. Stone’s $60 million film
World Trade Center
. “I’m interested in memorial and the way Hollywood represents historical events,” Mr. Moukarbel said in an interview a month before the Paramount movie was released. “Through their access and budget, they’re able to affect a lot of people’s ideas about an event and also affect policy. I was deliberately using their script and preempting their release to make a statement about power.”

The progress of artistic growth in many media is being hindered, like those poor pine trees in alpine zones able to grow only a few weeks each year. For writers and artists who came of age amid mountains and mountains of cultural artifacts and debris: all of this is part of their lives, but much of it is off-limits for artistic expression because someone “owns” it.

Shepard Fairey, borrowing liberally from traditions of urban art and the propaganda poster, took an image off Google and transformed it into a major icon of the 2008 campaign. The image (Obama, atop the word
HOPE
, looking skyward and awash in red, white, and blue) condensed the feeling of the Obama campaign into a single visual statement. It wasn’t until after the election that the Associated Press realized that it owned the copyright to one of the photos from which Fairey worked. Mannie Garcia, the photographer who took the photo, had no idea it was his work until it was pointed out to him. He later claimed that it was he who actually owned the copyright. This didn’t stop the Associated Press from demanding a large sum of money in “damages” for the now famous photo, which—until very recently—it didn’t know it had and in fact may not own the copyright to. In 2009, backed by Stanford University’s Fair Use Project, Fairey countersued the AP. When Fairey later acknowledged that he had lied about which image he’d used as the basis for his poster, Fairey’s attorneys withdrew from the case. Lawrence Lessig, the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard, who had been advising Fairey but not representing him, said that the significant issue in fair-use cases is whether the image has been transformed from the original; if it has been “fundamentally transformed,” he said, it is protected by copyright law.

Most of the passages in this book are taken from other sources. Nearly every passage I’ve clipped I’ve also revised, at least a little—for the sake of compression, consistency, or whim. You mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at …

You’ll notice that he doesn’t assert ownership over his ideas. He’s in some kind of Artaudian condition where all the ideas are unoriginated and unsourced; that’s how he can claim anybody else’s ideas as his own. Really all he wants to do is acquire everyone’s inner life.

Stolen property is the soul. Take them out of this book, for instance—you might as well take the book along with them; one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it. Restore them to the writer: he steps forth like a bridegroom.

He dedicated his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an alien tongue.

The recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries. We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the CD (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. There seems little doubt, though, as to the direction things are going. The recombinant is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore’s graphic novel
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
, machinima generated with game engines (
Quake, Halo, World of Warcraft
), Dean Scream remixes, genre-warping fan fiction from the universes of
Star Trek
or
Buffy
, the JarJar-less
Phantom Edit
, brand-hybrid athletic shoes, and Japanese collectibles rescued from anonymity by custom paint jobs. We seldom legislate new technologies into
being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of changes they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us—as surely and perhaps as terribly as we’ve been redefined by television.

reality tv