<videovortex> buta response to... why don't video artists and filmmakers occupy YouTube?

[Michael Szpakowski]

I can't help feeling there's something of a category
error going on in discussions of YouTube & the arts.
It's reflected in the way academia deals with artistic
questions with a kind of wannabe ( & entirely
spurious) scientificity.. ( I'm not excluding of
course the idea that there's an interesting
investigation to be made of YouTube by a genuine
sociologist of mass media).
Its as if any discussion of online video has to be
legitimised by the introduction of a quasi scientific
research programme...
( also as if curators, commentators &c are *slightly
embarrassed by the amount of *intentionality* involved
in making online-video-that-aspires-to-art...much
easier to try & be a half assed sociologist..)
You see it in calls for work too, where there is
almost inevitably a long preamble, usually a dull and
incoherent piece of confusion with little bits of half
digested philosophy & what have you masquerading as a
context, as if anyone actually made art that was worth
anything under such constraints! 
Now, YouTube is a great place for teenage boys
to..light farts..or whatever it is teenage boys do
nowadays..
Why is it not all that interesting for artists except
for those needy for scientific credentials ?..well
Jane said it..the videos look shite & any decent work
is lost amongst a morass of rather depressing
trivia..That needs to be said to clear the ground for
the fact that there is *lots* of wonderful video
pretty much in the art ballpark online -we show a
piece of it everyday on dvblog
http://www.dvblog.org/
It's varied in quality of course, but some of it is
breath takingly good & -& here's the rub- *somehow
different* for being made for the net..
Take a long time to discuss *how somehow different*,
but that discussion -the discussion of work *intended
by its maker as art & specifically made for the net*
is a much more interesting one than anything about
YouTube, unless of course you tread the lonely &
rigorous path of the *serious* sociologist of media..
To kick off & just to be provocative, what I really
like about video on the web is the way it does
undermine the notion of copyright, that enemy of
creativity...
michael