The Mash-Up Is All There Is

Lain—the Swiss artist behind Amateur, an independent street culture magazine—frames it plainly: our culture is a mash-up culture. It’s a sentence that could sound like a TED talk, but from someone who spends his days assembling a publication out of graffiti, fashion, photography, and whatever else bleeds through city walls, it reads more like a field report. He travels constantly, watching the same gestures surface in cities that have never spoken to each other, and Amateur is essentially a record of those echoes.

Around the same time, Cornelia Bölke—a student at the Weißensee School of Art in Berlin—won a contest that handed her an empty Adidas store in the city center and told her to do something with it. She filled it with handpicked designers and artists and called it a Shop Of Modern Arts. The idea of giving a young artist a blank commercial space and stepping back is either genuinely interesting or a very well-packaged PR exercise, and I’m not sure the distinction matters as much as what happens in the room. An empty space is just an empty space until someone does something with it.

The overlap between street culture and corporate sponsorship has never been comfortable, but it’s been ongoing long enough that the discomfort is part of the aesthetic. Amateur lives in that gap—not entirely outside the economy, not entirely absorbed by it. Which is probably what keeps it worth reading.