I have always embraced the idea of collage, taking existing objects and turning them into something new. Which is why I was never offended about the concept of sampling in Rap music. (“It’s like the old flip books you had as a kid,” an engineer friend was telling me recently, “Oh, here’s a fireman’s hat with a tuxedo and clown shoes, all mashed-up, cool!”) Layering of old records together in Hip Hop is a musical extention of what I loved so much about Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg.
Which is not to say that I like all collage or sampled-based music. But I dig the spirit of reinterpretation.
On that note, dig this, a 3-D exploration of Picasso’s seminal painting, Guernica:
