'MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture' addresses the development of detournement and deconstruction in art, architecture, music and society. Each chapter is a detailed, inclusive look at a cross-section of the main artists and thinkers that have embraced and developed all forms of 'mash up' culture, since its inception in the nineteenth century as early experiments of Braque and Picasso. 'MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture' finds parallels between the works of luminaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Price, Joyce Wieland and Jeff Wall. The book traces the lasting impact of such seemingly disparate cultural phenomena as voguing, hacking and the use of audio and film, and their further reappropriation as a kind of a globally available, open source language, and in developments in art that deal with the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge brought on by digital technologies. 'MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture' situates the work of Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton and Guy Debord alongside the likes of Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, Superstudio, Brian Eno and Cory Arcangel, and more generally within a culture where the new is necessarily remade and remodelled, and quotation and reappropriation are an integral part of the way we talk about it.
