Gh Hovagimyan's comment on Lee Wells post 'Andy, Nam June and Me at the Zoo by Lee Wells.'
YouTube -- ... The judgement criteria for web information is most popular, amount of visitors, hits etc.. The question is does that apply to art? I think not. Going back to high school, the most popular people were not the artists, they were the jocks and the cheerleaders. The artists were the outsiders, always at odds with high school society. Popularity is nice but it has little to do with the passion for making art nor the reason one engages in the act of art making. 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 (http://www.facebook.com/l/a57b9;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. Originally posted on Facbook, awaiting reply from Guggenblah blah... marc > Andy, Nam June and Me at the Zoo by Lee Wells. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
