They are received opinions. Large increments of our daily sensory input are not focused on the physical reality around us, but on the media that saturates it. As artists, we find this new electrified environment irresistibly worthy of comment, criticism, and manipulation. The act of appropriating from this media assault represents a kind of liberation from our status as helpless sponges which is so desired by the advertisers who pay for it all. Appropriation sees media, itself, as a telling source and subject, to be captured, rearranged, even manipulated, and injected back into the barrage by those who are subjected to it.
Appropriators claim the right to create with mirrors.
Our corporate culture, on the other hand, is determined to reach the end of this century while maintaining its economically dependent view that there is something wrong with all this. However, both perceptually and philosophically, it remains an uncomfortable wrenching of common sense to deny that when something hits the airwaves it is literally in the public domain. The fact that the owners of culture and its material distribution can claim this isn't true is a tribute to their ability to restructure common sense for maximum profit. Our cultural evolution is no longer allowed to unfold in the way that pre-copyright culture always did. True folk music, for example, is no longer possible.