“Karaoke Culture” by Dubravka Ugresic (Open Letter, 324 pgs., $15.95)

Dubravka Ugresic does not like karaoke. That doesn’t stop her from trying it, just as her resistance to celebrity doesn’t stop her from putting her head through a cutout on a Hollywood studio tour so that she can be photographed with Clark Gable. Ugresic, a game and inquisitive critic, looks at culture from all angles, which sometimes means picking up the mic.

Karaoke recycles rather than creates, she argues in “Karaoke Culture,” the 100-page essay that lends its name to the title of her new collection. To Ugresic, karaoke is emblematic of our contemporary moment: She sees it as a sad attempt to adopt the trappings of celebrity, an art that’s derivative without enrichment and a practice that degrades the original because it can never be quite as good.

“In all its manifestations karaoke culture unites narcissism, exhibitionism and the neurotic need for the individual to inscribe him or herself on the indifferent surface of the world,” she writes. It’s not just singing on stages: Ugresic traces these themes in reality television, fandom, hobbyists, politics, art and — of course — the Internet.

The idea that today’s culture has traded creativity for a backward lens is in the ether — it’s in Simon Reynolds’ book “Retromania” and recent buzzy articles by Kurt Andersen and Carl Wilson — but Ugresic winds through it vividly and personally, indicting herself as much as the impoverished culture she critiques.

Circling back to expropriation, she asks what the difference is between a postmodern reworking of “Alice in Wonderland,” say, and a fan fiction writer’s version. “(W)asn’t I the one who was,” she writes, “deconstructing texts to see how the mechanism worked, protected by trendy jargon like intertexuality and metatextuality? Didn’t I spread my literary feathers like a peacock, parading the elegance of my handiwork?”

Ugresic writes in short, episodic sections, making surprising leaps. An essay that begins with a Hemingway look-alike contest hops quickly to the arrest of Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic. The connections are electric: It’s an intellect in action, ideas zapping across the page.

The organization of an essay collection also allows the reader to begin making connections in the spaces between: Here Ugresic’s universal cultural criticism is front loaded. In the first half of the book, she writes of karaoke culture, YouTube, Barack Obama, Internet surfing, the sex trade in Hong Kong, travel, minibars and IKEA. Later essays focus on Croatia and the powerful — and, to her, distasteful — idea of nation and homeland; one on the literature of a certain Central European mindset is probably best tucked toward the end.