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Bruce at SXSW

Brad King has a good summary of Bruce Sterling's closing rant at SXSW Interactive. [Link]

"Mash-ups are in vogue," Sterling said. "People on the Internet like to think that mash-ups are incredibly great. Mash-ups are like novelty music. They are like The Monster Mash. It's bad music. Just because you can do it with a laptop and find an audience for it doesn't mean it's a cultural advance."

The audience sat quietly throughout much of the rant. The SXSW crowd, after all, is made up of the very people who are populating YouTube with videos, who submit mash-ups to YouTheManNowDog.com, who download music using peer-to-peer networks before reassembling it into new music. And here was one of their heroes telling them that what they were doing was no good, unworthy of being shown to sophisticated artists and craftspeople because their art--their culture--was a bad knockoff of other people's hard work.

jon posted this at 7:51 PM
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