I began this week with the new album from Gregg Gillis, or Girl Talk, a mash-up master who uses parts and pieces of tunes with seemingly no value judgment and often a tongue in cheek (Yo La Tengo + Missy + Cat Stevens + Timbaland). I love the album. I love that he knits an entirely new piece of music out of collected scraps even more.

It strikes me that we do this in other parts of our creative world these days too, using already manufactured goods as raw materials. In his Smoke Furniture, Maarten Baas uses controlled burning and finishing to “process” antiques into pieces with new layers of meaning. Tobi Wong has made a career of this, including on his bill of materials everything from MacDonalds coffee stirs to Alvar Aalto Savoy vases to the dollar bill.

The means for reediting our consumer world are handed down to us common folk as well. There is a whole website dedicated to hacking IKEA products into new objects. And Make Magazine presents us with dozens of ways monthly to rejigger the things around us.

Is this the privilege of an uber-consumer society? Indulgence, intelligent reuse, appropriation? I don’t know, but it does have a groove.