The title of Reality Hunger comes from Shields's idea that people today, living in an increasingly fragmentary culture, are experiencing a growing "hunger" for doses of real life injected into the art they experience.
According to his argument, traditional genres, such as realist fiction, are failing to adequately reflect lived reality because they have gone largely unchanged since their early development, and are therefore obsessed with current events because society rarely experiences any.
The role of plagiarism in art also constitutes a major theme.
Shields argues that plagiarism is something that artists have always partaken in, and that only recently has the act acquired the stigma it has, due in large part to copyright legislation and the culture surrounding it.
Rather than shy away from wholesale appropriation, Shields encourages it, stating that “reality-based art hijacks its material and doesn’t apologize.”[3] In support of this argument, the work includes a chapter on hip-hop, which, in addition to examining other facets of the genre, discusses the genre's use of DJing, sampling, and remixing.
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