By Della Hasselle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MIDTOWN — Hip-hop, a hippity hop...Grandmaster Flash and others are giving MoMA a fresh mix starting this Wednesday.
"The Making of Music 3.0," a new exhibit at MoMA, takes a look at what Grandmaster Flash calls "New York New York, big city of dreams" through the eyes of hip-hop giants and other famous artists from the late 70s and 80s.
Remix culture, as traced in the exhibit, originated in the gritty South Bronx in the 1970s and eventually made its way to Manhattan. The style was steered over more than two decades by such artists as Run DMC, the Beastie Boys, Kathleen Hanna, Le Tigre and Christian Marclay.
The exhibit features pictures of graffiti-stained walls, giant boom boxes and cartoon-influenced album covers mixed with lyrics about dingy, drug-riddled Lower East Side streets, stoop steps and break dancing.
"In this dynamic time period, imaginative forms of street art spread across the five boroughs, articulating the counter-culture tenor of the time," curator Barbara London said of the birth of remix culture.
Appropriation came about as "the city transitioned from bankruptcy to solvency, graffiti, media, and performance artists took advantage of low rents and collaborated on ad hoc works shown in alternative spaces and underground clubs," she added.
The use of appropriation, or remixing, can be heard in the exhibit in the 1981 Tom Tom Club song "Genius of Love," which was appropriated by Grandmaster Flash, and seen in the mix between "Uptown" and "Downtown" in a photograph of Flash and Tom Tom Club's Tina Weymouth.
The exhibit also addresses how the birth of hip-hop and the development of the digital domain in art and music eventually led to the symbiotic relationship that hip hop has with contemporary art today.
"I think what we saw with the 80s and 90s is it began kind of in the streets. It's that do-it-yourself rough edge," London said. "As it became more mainstream...it became filtered out from music, more of part of a general culture."
The similarities between then and now are closer than people might think, however.
"Everybody has a mobile phone, and we're all just going between image, sound, song, text," London added. "That kind of fluidity is what was happening in 80s and 90s."
"Looking At Music 3.0" is at the Museum of Modern Art at W. 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, from Feb. 16 to June 6.
