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“Some people would never be considered,
were
it not that some excellent adversaries had mentioned them. There is no
greater
vengeance than oblivion, as it buries such people in the dust of their
nothingness.”
—Baltazar Gracian, as quoted in “Open Creation
and Its
Enemies,”Internationale Situationniste
#5 (December 1960)
For over 45 years the art
world has seen many challenges to the
discourse of expanded cinema, video
art, and now
digital new
media.
Are videos on sites like YouTube to be
considered the new Anti-Art?
Today, it’s funny to look back only five
years at the first
YouTube video, “Me at the Zoo” by
Google co-founder Jawed
Karim, and consider Andy Warhol’s cliched “15
minutes”
in light of the Internet,
YouTube
and 21st
century
video art.
As misguided as the concept unfortunately may be,
fame
is no
longer relative to time and has rooted itself in the act of
participation,
sharing, and community. It is obvious today that Nam
June Paik was
correct in his prediction that something
would
happen
to not only offer us access to millions
of channels but to allow us
to create, curate, and critique for a global
critical mass that is
interacting 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Billions
of ephemeral
stars looking to connect with others with the
slight, almost random
chance of reaching a “too
real to
be true”
state of popular
acclaim.
“This
is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow
when you will be able
to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV Guides will
be as fat
as the Manhattan telephone book.”
—Nam June Paik, from the
introduction to Global Groove
1973
The fact that, according to YouTube,“people
are
watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundred
thousands
more daily”
is not as important as the new kind of relationships that
have been
formed between the creator and the world at large, forming a dynamic
abstracted
identity that artist Miroslaw
Rogala
coined in the neologism of the
viewer-user or (v)user, which allows
for the facilitation of open
creation and a much more participatory
culture than
there has been in the past with cinema, television, and
art through
the development of participant relationships on a global level.
To me, this seems to conceptually fulfill a
number of the major
objectives in line with the historical 20th
century avant garde (Dada,
Situationist,
Fluxus,
and Neoist)
agendas in regards to art, politics,
and society.
". . . purge the world of
bourgeois
sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional &
commercialized culture . . . PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN
ART . . . promote NON ART REALITY
to be grasped by all peoples, not
only critics, dilettantes and professionals . . . FUSE the cadres of
cultural, social & political
revolutionaries into
united front &
action." —George Maciunas, from
the first Fluxus Manifesto
The current problem is that the mainstream
commercial
art world takes this thought as a threat and an act of subversion
against
the institution of contemporary art by
denying it of its previous
privilege
to control access to points
of entry and in turn its dissemination
to the masses. Digital media’s
objectlessness and ability to bypass state and
institutional
controls adds renewed momentum to Asger Jorn’s demand that “the
Avant-Garde
doesn’t give up.”
Online research can be found in my
favorites on my YouTube
profile.
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People making and presenting videos on youTube are engaged in an art like activity. When Lee asks if youTube is anti-art he's referring to art dialectic. That is a mechanism by which artist enlarge the scope of what is considered art by including forms that negate the existing art system in some manner. The classic is Duchamp's readymades.
Recently Artists Meeting (an art collaborative in New York) created a series of events where they curated youTube videos. These are presented in an art context. In some instances the group used Jeff Krouse's tool you3b.com to create youTube triptych's. The shift of these videos into an art context by the artists make the event art. It must be noted that Jeff Krouse is a digital artist. He writes code (in this case javascript), to make art. The youTube videos are the material and the subject of the art. The choice is in the aesthetic decisions.
New Media and the digital realm are funded by a global capitalist communication enterprise. YouTube's funding mechanism is the IPO and advertising. The most popular videos generate advertising dollars. New Media artists tend to subvert these mechanisms. They create code and hacks that make the digital realm move the way they want. The artists hijack, appropriate, subvert and disrupt the communication flow. In the new media popularity contest the artist will always be the least popular, the outsider, the lone voice in the wilderness.