Waiting for the Appropriating Moment

The New York Times describes an interesting example of appropriation art in a story about "Texts without Context," which describes David Shields' new book Reality Hunger, a "manifesto" composed half of borrowed and unattributed quotations. In the NYT review of the actual book, reviewer Luc Sante tries to assess Shields' claim that a literary movement is brewing, one that can also be seen in Jonathan Lethem's recent essay on "The ecstasy of influence," which ran in Harper's.