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Appropriation. It’s ubiquitous. Artists incorporate existing images, objects, or styles into their work. How easy is it to borrow or steal elements from a pre-existing work? One culture, tradition, or context makes an appearance. Often without permission or proper acknowledgment, the artist incorporates them into another.
This has long been a force in art, a way of taking what already exists and shaping it into something that feels new. At its core, appropriation operates on a tension between novelty and familiarity. It asks audiences to recognize a source and see it in a new light. This interplay is central to the concept of the remix.
Visual art, music, literature, or social media. The audience eats it up. We find it irresistible. The act of reinterpreting an existing work creates meaning. Not only in the new object itself, but in the relationship it forms with its original context.
Remix culture resonates. Which makes you wonder why humans respond to novelty and familiarity.
We’re wired to respond to both the comfort of the familiar and the excitement of the novel. Familiarity signals safety. Someone ahead of us has already tested what we know. They understood it. Which means we understand it.
But novelty is different from familiarity. Novelty triggers curiosity and the brain’s reward circuits, encouraging exploration and attention. Too much familiarity can feel dull; too much novelty can feel chaotic. The sweet spot lies in balance: the recognition of the known with the spark of the new.
Appropriated works thrive in this zone. They rely on audiences’ recognition of a source. It could be a famous brand logo, a pop song, or a meme. All you have to do is offer enough novelty to reframe it, make it surprising, or even subversive. The remix thus becomes a psychological dialogue between memory and imagination.
Andy Warhol’s
Contemporary artists continue to operate in this space. Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evans’ Depression-era photographs. But she presented them as her own to question originality and authorship. Richard Prince did the same thing. He gained prominence in the 1980s by rephotographing existing images. His most famous works include rephotographing Marlboro cigarette advertisements. Prince removed text to create new artistic statements about American mythology and masculinity. Kehinde Wiley reimagines classical European portraiture with contemporary Black subjects. Wiley remixes canonical poses to challenge who gets represented in art history. Each case renders the same kind of response.
Appropriation relies on the audience’s familiarity with the original form. Novelty emerges in the shift of context, subject, or purpose. The power lies in recognition followed by re-interpretation.
Guess which field has embraced the remix. Give up? Music. Hip-hop, born from sampling and DJ culture, is a direct expression of appropriation as art. Early hip-hop DJs looped breakbeats from funk and disco records. These musicians layered rhymes over them to create something both familiar and new. The audience recognized James Brown’s drum breaks or Chic’s basslines. But the reconfiguration gave the sound fresh life and meaning. Listeners recognized the groove. It was familiar enough to feel good, but the lyrical context and rhythmic shifts made it exciting.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, electronic music depended on remixes. From house music to Al Jourgensen’s industrial band Ministry, the remix was fuel. Mashup culture in the 2000s pushed this further. Consider artists like Girl Talk. He layered dozens of recognizable pop and rock tracks into frenetic collages. Part of the thrill was recognizing snippets of familiar songs. Take the opening riff of Nirvana, and drop in the vocal hook from Beyoncé. Then why not weave into surprising juxtapositions? The brain lights up in moments of recognition. But novelty arises from the unexpected pairing.
Even mainstream pop thrives on this balance. Remixes of songs by DJs or producers often keep the recognizable vocal hook. Producers surround it with new beats or tempos. Audiences gravitate to the anchor of familiarity. Then we’re drawn in by the freshness of the reinterpretation. Appropriation in music is an obvious example. Novelty and familiarity can intertwine to produce emotional and cultural resonance.
Literature, too, has long been a field of remix. Writers always borrow, allude, and reframe. Consider how James Joyce’s Ulysses reworks Homer’s Odyssey. The author transplants the epic’s structure into the mundane life of Dublin. The reader recognizes parallels. Which gives them an anchor. Notice how the novelty of Joyce’s modernist experimentation creates the spark.
What about Beat Poets and postmodern writers such as Kathy Acker? The author cuts up and reassembles texts from other authors. William S. Burroughs is famous for this method. His experimental novel Naked Lunch (1959) featured his innovative “cut-up technique”. Burroughs cut up pages of text and rearranged them to create new narratives. Which foregrounds appropriation as both method and critique. Consider contemporary retellings such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. Which rewrites Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha Mason. These examples offer familiar narratives reframed in ways that challenge cultural assumptions. In each case, the pleasure lies in the double vision. The reader’s knowledge of the original text enriches their experience of the new work.
Even fan fiction operates within this psychological framework. Writers build on familiar characters and worlds. Which provides readers the comfort of recognition. It does this while exploring novel plots, relationships, and perspectives. This balance makes fan communities thrive.
We’re familiar with the known world anchors. But the new interpretations provide a precise amount of novelty which is delightful.
Today, the remix appears in social media culture. This is where memes are a form of rapid-fire appropriation. Memes rely on recognizable images or formats. We can’t get enough of the “Distracted Boyfriend” stock photo. The “Drake Yes/No” reaction panels never get old. It’s how ideas spread. We find meaning in how they’re re-captioned or recontextualized. The humor and impact come from recognition plus twist. We’re the audience that knows the format and enjoys seeing it applied in surprising, novel ways.
Why are TikTok trends a thing? A popular audio clip circulates. Then users layer their own performances, jokes, or contexts over it. The familiarity of the sound or format provides cohesion across the platform. While the novelty of each reinterpretation keeps the trend alive. Social media thrives on this constant churn of appropriation, doesn’t it? Novelty and familiarity fuel both virality and cultural connection.
What’s the connection between Warhol’s soup cans and TikTok memes? Something unites all these forms. It’s a continuum of the signifier and the signified. The recognition that culture is a system. A byproduct of the dynamic transfer of knowledge. Perpetual reworking of ideas.
But is the remix a degradation of originality? Consider it a mode of cultural dialogue. Artists and creators play with the constructed nature of meaning. How? By appropriating and reframing. The psychology of novelty and familiarity explains why this practice resonates. The remix mirrors how our brains process the world. We want to hold on to the known while seeking out the new.
At the same time, appropriation raises questions of authorship, ownership, and power. Who gets to remix whom? When does appropriation become exploitation? These debates show that the remix is not only aesthetic but political. What I mean by that is, the best idea wins. Sometimes bad ideas win (anti-rational memes). That’s why it’s a continuum. The remix is memetic.
Still, its psychological force remains. We love works that let us recognize and rethink at the same time.
Appropriation and the remix thrive on a delicate balance. We don’t want too much familiarity. Or else the work feels derivative. We don’t want too much novelty. Because then we lose the connection. We’re looking for the sweet spot. That is, recognition plus surprise. Which captures our attention, provokes thought, and often generates cultural momentum. From Warhol’s visual provocations to hip-hop sampling. As well as literary rewriting, and meme culture. The remix has become a central mode of expression in modern life. It speaks to the wiring of our minds. We want to find comfort in the familiar, joy in the novel, and meaning in the spaces where the two meet.
Sean Allen Fenn
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