What do you get when you combine a maudlin scene from Little House on the Prairie with the Thompson Twins’s 1980s pop hit Hold Me Now?

A mashup.

A mashup recombines elements of two or more pre‐existing songs or videos, usually by two different artists. Of course, mashing‐up artwork is nothing new. Dadaists, and later beat generation authors, introduced cutting up, i.e. combining non‐related texts and rearranging them to create a new work. Today’s mash‐ups mirror the ubiquity of popular culture, internet and memetics of the hive‐mind. Artists Cory Arcangel, Natalie Bookchin, Christian Marclay and Michael Robinson’s artworks pay homage to mass media: film, music, television and YouTube videos.