More from the discussion on Paddy Johnson's blog of the Guggenheim Museum's call-for-entries for artists to make YouTubes that will be judged and exhibited as art. The museum's teaser video is just awful.
Commenter Paul Slocum says: "I’ve decided that instead of submitting something myself, I’m going to contact producers on Youtube who are true to the spirit of Youtube and deserve recognition, and urge them to submit specific videos to the contest. Rally, y’all."
My reply to that:
Here are my YouTube faves. Paul Slocum has a good idea of encouraging producers we like to submit but after watching that Guggenheim call-for-submissions video again I wouldn’t wish that process on my worst enemies. Normal video pausing into pseudo-glitchy jitter, gratuitous sped-up city scenes, quasi-8 bit music, a groovy fake Yellow Submarine sequence, stop-motion graffiti oozing off the wall and strutting around: the full panoply of effects a 30-something high paid art director would create to conjure happenin’ youth. By contrast, the work in the above faves list is no-budget, sincere, incomprehensible, vague, “weak,” anti-YouTube, no-style, slight, non-corporate, etc (but also brilliant). Recall what happened when Guthrie Lonergan curated a group of touchingly inept MySpace intros on YouTube. The work got duller when it was linked to directly by Rhizome.org and even duller when shown on professional gear at the New Museum. The work I love most would shrivel in the institutional spotlight and I shudder to think of a techie explaining to Silicious how to make a more polished use of Poser software.
Update: YouTube is constantly changing the size of the player window, such that pieces that need to be full bleed suddenly acquire annoying letterboxing. Just noticed that a few more pixels have been added to the width so that even the widescreen pieces a few months ago now have thin vertical black stripes on the right and left. The only kind of art anybody should be making for this "medium" is shitty half-assed art that will somehow survive the hosts' regular tinkering.
Update, 2013: I closed the "Teleclysm" YouTube account over the "unitary identity" issue and general Google weirdness.