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'Aaron Rose, Mandy Kahn and Brian Roettinger’s book 'Collage Culture' ... aims to raise questions about the current status of things. “Why has the 21st century become an era of collage, in which creative works are made by combining elements from the former century?” the authors ask, “Why have musicians, writers and designers fallen in love with the past, busying themselves with borrowing instead of creating their art from scratch?” Rose says that the book came out of disappointment at how artists were repeating previous generations’ work rather than striving to create something new – the replication of the past rather than its reinvention. “I have always thought that the job of youth was to put their elders out of business. Not out of disrespect, but out of a longing, a real human longing, to be better than the last generation. To push things to the next level. To commit patricide.” Rose considers, “Sometimes when I look at guys like Kanye West, I wonder what they’re thinking. Those guys just steal and steal.”
Reworking, however, isn’t the same as theft. A number of artists are looking backwards and absorbing the past to create a new visual future. Theorist/artist/ writer Svetlana Boym has come up with a concept that is having increasing resonance: “As you know, postmodernism is dead. In fact, each time the end of history was declared, as in 1989 or 2000, we witnessed the return of history with vengeance. We are living in the culture of rapid obsolescence of everything and a fast pace of forgetting of history that strikes back as a boomerang. To bring back Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the culture of information and the culture of experience, the culture of information does not always allow us to digest, inhabit and make meaning of the recent events. Many contemporary artists return to a slower pace of reflection and an alternative new media which I call off-modern.”' - Francesca Gavin
