Cross-disciplinary methods: righteous or irreverent?

The most interesting thing about the camera is its ability to automatically re-contextualize time and space within the edges of a frame. In the early days of photography, the camera was seen as a way to make art by eliminating the use of paint on a canvas, and to recreate the experience of viewing a painting as a kind of “shortcut.” The process of cropping an image, or the act of framing a shot actually was an influence from painting, not vice versa. In fact, intentional edge-cropping started to be used in painting years before the advent of the camera, and can be seen in the work of Degas and Gauguin, with figures sliced off the edge of the canvas:

Edgar Degas, Place De La Concorde

The process of cropping an image is actually one of artistic perspective and technique, not a constraint imposed by the camera. The fact that a camera will frame an experience is actually an interesting coincidence rather than a characteristic of photography. The difference is that a camera does this spontaneously and sometimes at random—with surprising results.

Music sampling and mashups have followed the history of photography, i.e. the idea that using existing source material shortens the time it takes to make a piece of art, even though some of the source material may include work of other artists that had worked years to develop their craft, not to mention the money they may have spent to get there. As photography was a way to speed up a painting, it didn't use paintings as its source material.

There is no dispute as to the usefulness of metaphors to shape and define art or music, but appropriation is either righteous or irreverent. It takes a lot of thought to consider how the appropriation uses its source material and the people involved in making it. Who likes to parody a hero as opposed to honoring them?