Six books about rethinking of the rules of artistic appropriation

David Shields’s new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is:

an ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever larger chunks of “reality” into their work. The questions Shields explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly around us, and Reality Hunger is a rigorous, radical reframing of how we might think about this “truthiness”: about literary license, quotation, and appropriation in television, film, performance art, rap, and graffiti, in lyric essays, prose poems, and collage novels.

For The Week magazine, he named six books that inspired the project. One title on the list:

The Art Lover by Carole Maso

I love this obsessively quotation-crazy book to death. She can’t stop thinking; she can’t stop thinking about what other people are thinking; she can’t stop thinking via what other people are thinking.

Read about another book on Shields's list.

--Marshal Zeringue