Po-mo Bob Dylan

This amazing essay on Dylan's use of... sampling... pastiche... influence... plagiarism.  On Harper's, here.  Incredible piece, even for a writer of Jonathan Lethem's genius.  

"The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close contact with the matter that made up their world. André Breton's maxim “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects in an unexpected context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities."

My own new book, Artifact Eleven, is a mash-up of histories, geographies, geologies, journals... all oriented toward the Nevada desert.  The large-scale land artist Michael Heizer was a huge influence on this project, and I've used his own language in two of the works in the book.  As Heizer himself has written: "anything becomes a part of where it is if you take it and put it there."  Heizer's talking about rocks, here, and he's being characteristically to-the-point.  If you apply the quote more broadly, though, it could be used to justify a wide variety of bad behavior. 

So what is art?  What are the responsibilities of an artist to his/her source materials?  Questions no one's taken on as originally as Lethem does in his essay, here.  I'm glad my friend Luke brought it to my attention.

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