As a consequence of their ease of use, and as a result of their mass popularity, Internet platforms have become the preeminent domain of and locus for the development of collective authorship. Their speed, ease, and omnipresence make them extremely well suited as a place for quickly launching ideas, responding to others, or adapting existing work and reusing it. A new generation of artists use platforms like YouTube to simultaneously work with others and create new works on the spot. A single idea, concept, or video gets transformed in different variations through easy online sharing—the comment being the essential element for continuous development. The artworks that arise from these collective processes lie in a continuum with other works, references, and commentaries, often leading to different versions and forms of one work.

With the theoretical issues I raised in my previous post in mind, I’m going to present some suggestions that might begin to address the practical concerns that they raise. To wit: one way of offering insight while enhancing the visitor’s experience (both online and at the various Guggenheim museums) would be to have YouTube Play’s jurors, curators, and artists provide commentary tracks for the pieces, which could be selected or ignored, much in the manner of more conventional exhibition audio-guides or DVD extras. Another way would be to invite both Play participants and viewers to remix or re-curate each other’s work. This would not only speak to the user-generated capacities of the material’s origins, but also provide new associations with—and provocative juxtapositions of—the works on display.

I am sitting in Southend Central library, a minor classic of provincial Brutalist architecture by the southern English coast, watching a pop video from 1984 by Yello in a purpose-built screening room designed by the artist James Richards (who recently featured in the New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus exhibition).

In my first post, I said that YouTube Play offered a unique opportunity for the museum to investigate the shifting sands of our visual culture. I want to follow up on that idea by talking about how the museum might take up the curatorial challenge presented by Play.

Of the many categories for one-upmanship in filmmaking, a special place has long been reserved for any director who can pull off a ridiculously long take. The lengthy walk-and-talk shots in films like Preston Sturges's Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) are largely practical and cost effective, one may surmise, in that they make short work of long sections of script. Jean-Luc Godard helped push the long take up to the level of a bona fide political intervention—recall the supermarket shot near the end of Tout va bien, his 1972 collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin—and more recently Steve McQueen showed his mettle in staging an epic ten-minute encounter in a single long shot, a passing moment in his larger effort to neuter real political history via a cocktail of stylized filth and suffering rendered chic (Hunger [2008]).