Owning Art

There was a piece of art that I created years ago called Just the Red Garments From 16th and 17th-century Painting, which involved photographing just the red garments worn in Old Master paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, stitching them together in a digital file and printing it on silk, so as to embed the "aura" from the paintings as well as things that were happening in the world at that time. It was "documentary fabric".

I thought it would be interesting to create a piece of music based on it and have started to track it up. It's beginning to sound like EDM of all things. But can I "own" EDM as a boomer? To me, it's just playing loops and samples and I don't identify with the sounds necessarily.

But perhaps every generation "owns" their sounds--even though they're older sounds and come from old synthesizers. Older musicians can use the sounds, which may seem new to younger generations, but we've been there before. But if I create the music as a continuation of the Red Scarf piece, then it's a part of the overall concept, with the music representing the individual "swatches" in the work.

An artist can "own" a cultural artifact as a "quotation" rather than using it in such a way to suggest that it was new or proprietary or as a part of pop culture.

The Illuminated Riff: