army of youtube is a good article

gives me many points to ruminate on

especially true for us here in vancouver where the sheer scale of
economy around olympics and how it is sweeping up everything in its
path

i am optimistic though

the more youtube we have the more crap we need to consume this i am sure of

there is hope for us yet

yours

jin@instantcoffee.org

Happy new year and all that! I just got around to reading your piece on youtube – I thought it was good and seems to have sparked some lively discussion (Eli!!). I’m starting to come back around to the more expansive idea I had of art several years ago. I think the time around Paul and Andrew and all the raw physicality and valuation of the work made me lean in that direction, toward value in the unique materiality, although that really goes against a lot of what I believe art can do (other than sit in someone’s house and have a prominent place on the balance sheet). I thought you negotiated the precipice well – there’s the very conservative artist-genius-unique-emanation on the one hand (which Krauss et al haven’t hesitated to call fascist to its face) and then the watery weak espresso line of Rikrit et al on the other. If I understand you right, I think you’re saying there’s room for something else between those two extremes, and that youtube and other ‘virtual technologies’ may facilitate its coming about. I definitely think there’s something there, but it’ll only be recognised if people can get away from the post-conceptualism reactionary attitude that sees somewhat more ephemeral art as hackish and without value, not ‘real’ art. art, the identity of whose ‘author’ is in question. anyway, have to get back to work!

Take care,
Ken

I’ve been thinking about Youtube (footage) as a subject of contemporary video art. So I thought of video art more as a medium which organises Youtube “into a second level of meaning”, as you describe it.

For me it seems that Youtube temporarily is able to close the gap between art and popular culture, but also between web theory and cultural studies. I think art here in this case provides a “framework of intelligibility”. Also Youtube ‘refreshes’ art with its constant output and offers a stage for revising the producer-consumer model as early conceptual video art did with TV. Most recently, there were too many works made with an intentional backwardness when it comes to form.

In addition, I dislike the hedonism in contemporary art which goes along
with its “total capitulation to corporate interests” and its “devotion to
the capricious practices of unregulated free market capitalism” (quote from
Bruce LaBruce). Its interesting to ask why Youtube evokes expectations that
art could be challenged or vice versa. On one side we admire the early
conceptual video art works (those addressing the camera like many Youtube
amateurs do today). Its characteristics appeal on Youtube in a mainstream
application. Maybe one could say that Youtube accomplishes utopian ideas of avantgarde art, at least for a short time… I was repeatedly reminded
of Youtube’s corporate property.

Like Earl Miller who commented earlier on your article, I was thinking about
similarities between early conceptual video art and Youtube. For the
screening “Always on your minds” I made a compilation of video art works
with different relations to Youtube. I presented the program at the Ankara
edition of the conference series “Video Vortex” last autumn. Part of the
program was a video by Karolin Meunier. In the video she seems to double
form and content by performing for the camera and reflecting in her
monologue the act of speaking and the condition of the speaker in general.

The video’s text is a montage of quotes from about 10 different sources, like the video “Boomerang” by Richard Serra, in which Nancy Holt is interrupted by the feedback of her own voice or a paragraph from Rosalind Krauss well known text “The Aesthetics of Narcissism” in which Krauss writes on Boomerang. With her conceptual resumption or renewal Meunier connects the video Boomerang and its reception. In so doing she continues the discourse on video technology regarding the construction of subjects.

I would like to recommend to you the Video Vortex reader:
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/files/2008/10/vv_reader_small.pdf

(On 20/21 November Video Vortex 5 takes place in Brussels, maybe you have time to go there: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/)

Best, V

http://rosemheather.wordpress.com/

great article! and there’s so much more to talk about!
(I’m writing(trying to write) something tangential about 1970s video
being a preview of youtube)

love the inadequacy of relational aesthetics comments. It makes me
feel better about myself.
Concerning your thoughts on YouTube and emergence you may enjoy Bruno
Latour’s writing on Actor Network Theory ANT

thanks for sharing!!

Jeremy