Video Killed the (new) Art Star
Video killed the radio star
Pictures came and broke your heart
Oh-a-a-a oh
The Buggles
Michael O'Sullivan's eloquent review in today's WaPo makes a powerful point about art videos. Read it here.
And it got me to thinking.
I don't hide the fact that most art videos (which I have sometimes called artists' home movies) leave me pretty ambivalent, especially as I try to view them as art, rather than entertainment.
In the nearly 70 year history of artists' home movies, I can probably count in one hand the number of them that I would even remotely consider as something more than a low budget attempt at making a film, and most of those on that list start before the VCR was invented.
Nonetheless, it is a fact that most of the voices in the art world that count and weigh in a lot heavier than mine, do still view video (pun intended) as the leading edge for creativity in the modern dialogue of the visual arts (even though the genre is now in its 7th decade).
Witness the recent video overload in the Whitney Biennial list as the most recent evidence.
History lesson for anyone born after 1980 or so: Before everyone had VCRs or DVD players in their homes, if you wanted to see a movie, you generally had to go to a movie theatre, and many American cities had a seedy neighborhood where porn theatres were concentrated - when I was a kid in Brooklyn, that seedy area was in and around Times Square in NYC.
And just like video killed the radio star, it also killed seedy porn theatres all over the landscape but concurrently it gave the porn industry a huge new life that they had never hereto dreamed of and also gave them access to the privacy of the home as it eliminated the requirement to visit a seedy theatre in order to view a porn movie.
And as O'Sullivan intelligently deduces, now the Vlogging Revolution hands us all a brilliant opportunity to once and for all do for art videos what VCRs and DVDs did for the porn industry (in a sense), but in this case remove them from our galleries and museums and put them on the web, where we can watch them whenever and wherever we want!
This is a win-win situation for nearly all.
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