More and more, art is cannibalizing itself in order to create something new. More specifically, the creators of mainstream arts are combining elements of pre-existing media with current trends in an attempt to come up with a hybrid so bastardized from its original forms that no one will notice. Even worse still, that no one will care.
Take for example the recent Internet sensation, the Bed Intruder Song. For those who don’t know the origins of the song, I will explain. Briefly. A news story about a man who broke into a woman’s house at night and tried to rape her, but was scared off by her brother, who rushed in to help, aired on WAFF in Huntsville, Alabama. Antoine Dodson, the brother, is shown warning fellow citizens to hide their kids and hide their wives while threatening that the perpetrator will be found. Of course, auto-tuned sound bites from this news story made perfect fodder for a hit pop song.
This sort of post-modern pop phenomenon is the equivalent of multi-processed food. Think about it: what are the whole sources of the Bed Intruder Song? First we have the news story from WAFF. The news story itself is a conglomeration of two whole parts, those being the original source video and audio. The Bed Intruder Song lifts the audio from the news story, divorcing it from its original context, adds auto-tune and finally cuts and pastes the sound bites in anachronistic order. As if that wasn’t enough, synthesized instruments are added to create a heavily processed and manipulated art, one several layers removed from its elements’ singular, whole sources.
Like processed food, processed arts are full of empty calories: they have no inherent meaning or value. Will anyone remember the Bed Intruder Song in a year? I don’t think so. The art that is remembered has value and meaning, and that is because it is made from whole sources. The Mona Lisa is made of a canvas and paint, neither of which held a context before they were put together. That is the key difference: whole arts divided into their elements lose all contexts. They are pure and powerful. I posit a return to whole arts.
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