Collage is everywhere: visuals, sounds, and text, and the collage itself made a new life for the collaged, creating various artistic movements that have been leading the twentieth and the twenty-first century. The subtitle of Lethem’s article, “a plagiarism,” pointed directly to the ethical perspective of collage.
Lethem provides me with a dilemma that is substantially used in the art field: what is the nature and the influence of “collage”? One the one hand, “any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony” (68). Whether it is in the English or Chinese literature, using allusions is a prevalent and charming thing to rich the connotation of a piece of work. Meanwhile, the second-time use of some literature reclaims the value of that original piece. On the other hand, it is always questions to consider whether it is an ethical choice to do so, whether the value of arts can be commodified, what belongs to the human society and what belongs to the private sphere.
In the digital age when the copy-and-paste becomes easy, how should we treat the collaged elements? I think Lethem has given us a good example: contextualizing the original meaning and provenance of the work he used and give credit to the cited pieces at the end of the article, as what he has done at the pp. 70-71.