[NetBehaviour] Andy, Nam June and Me at the Zoo by Lee Wells.

[marc garrett]

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.