Musings on Music (mostly)

  Doris Salcedo's Chairs installation (2003)   Or its anagram: everything is a remix. The idea that everything comes from everything isn't always interesting. Photo mosaics of the Mona Lisa or other related or ironic sources was interesting at one point but are now a cliche. It is still a clever device but doesn't have much generative depth. The source images are charged with significance, in which the collaged work automatically inherits. To use the term "sculpture" to define a piece of music, its "materiality" is in copyrighted material, as opposed to found objects. In terms of "contaminating" metaphors (i.e. words that "infect" meaning) perhaps it is better that words are "lost" (as in "I am at a loss for words"). As soon as we use a word like remix (as in Everything is a Remix) it makes it possible to posit that all creativity is derivative. This is self-evident, and requires no elaboration: The word itself...