Pastiche Magic

Recently I figured out how to make iTunes show all the album covers of the music I've got. I missed album covers.

Someone else likes album covers too.

This is fun to watch, but it's also fun to think about how many copyrighted images are being used without permission and how great the result is. The funny thing about recorded media like sounds and pictures is that they are so specific that referencing them often requires using the thing itself. So intertextuality in these media gets legally sticky. But intertextuality is so great and artistically useful. It's a mainline to an established vein of cultural meaning and using it just makes the cultural object that much more significant by its inclusion in other works. No such thing as bad publicity? Hey, it's not like Mary Shelley's estate comes after every person who writes a poem in which Frankenstein shows up. Frankenstein, through intertextuality, has grown beyond just being a character in a book and has become a trope.

It's overly simplistic in the mode of "why can't we all just get along," but why can't we all just use what's around to make what we want? Why does everyone have to get so bloody grabby?