A bratwurst mash-up

I just read a New York Times article on FB about how a 17 year old author in Germany is all the rage, but someone discovered that she had lifted some paragraphs from someone else's work, and put them into her novel, without telling anyone about it. My first reaction was to think of her as a plagiarist, and though I haven't read the book, or even heard of the author, the article gave the idea that only some paragraphs or pages were lifted and that the novel had a 'mash-up' feel, and I couldn't deny that in the 'post-post-postmodern' era we live in, that her literary mash-up might be very little different than listening to any pop song on the radio that mixes old beats with new beats, to make something new, or as Helene Hegemann said, "there's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," and this struck me as true, given the age we live in, because postmodernism branched out from modernism (Van Gogh, Picasso), when artists and thinkers thought that you could still make something new, like an explorer dreams of discovering a civilization. Well, we think that most of the world has now been discovered, and I guess this radical idea has lead us to believe that with geography goes art (and politics), and there is 'no originality anymore, just authenticity.' When I first learned about postmodernism in the late Eighties the big idea for me, since I can only think in terms of art, was that 'collage' was the only form of museum like art left that had any validity, since you were making it from newspaper, magazines, old books, and anything else lying around, but were reinterpreting the old in a way that made it new, and then Hip Hop came along (I was late), and made this painfully clear with its endless samplings of old hits that we all knew and loved remixed into something new. I also know that 'sampling' took a real hit when the DJ's and artists doing it were forced to pay songwriting royalties, and I'm not sure what I think about that, wavering between wishing everything was free, and realizing that artists need to live too, including me, but deep down I think everything should be free, and it would be a better world.

I don't want to defend Ms. Hegemann too much, because I just glanced at an article and saw some photos where a journalist was calling her the 'enfant terrible' that Germany had been looking for for generations, so 'plagiarizing' just might be part of her bad girl personae right now, that she's cultivating, if the photos are any proof, and I'd hate to blindly support that, but the questions she raises are fascinating. Is the novel ready for an infusion of Hip-Hop cool? Maybe.... though I've never done this myself, and would sort of shy away from it, and yet that makes me sound old fashioned and conservative, so I've got to really re-evaluate my position. I'm not against a literary mash up, and actually think it might be the only way to get back to true art, or a primal kind of poetry, but where I get tripped up in this story, and where my ignorance is revealed, is that I'm not sure if the way that Hegemann used the lifted paragraphs, somehow flowed naturally into either her prose, or that of someone else, that she'd mixed and matched perfectly, like an interior decorator, or a postmodern artist. If she did either of these things, she is a talented artist, and I can't really critique her, so I guess the question becomes an economic one more than anything, and this is always sticky in the realm of art, but legally speaking should Hegemann a) pay a royalty?, or b) acknowledge the writers she lifted and made new again. I certainly think she should do 'b' because that's what I'd do, but I was accused of plagiarism in high school and took the charge so personally, that I just haven't been free enough to make this step, that just kind of blows me away, and makes me want to read the book. Or maybe I don't have to and have already intuited the genius of Hegemann's post-post-postmodern novel, since the idea ultimately trumps the art in a true postmodern ethos, the idea being everything, and the art secondary.

I'm jealous of Helen Hegemann and for the first time in years realize how behind the times I am but I don't have a literary agent and was never geared that way, but still this is an impressive feat, kind of like 'Bagism,' an artistic movement that lasted a year or two. She has really turned the novel upside down.