Deus Ex Machina for Voyeurs

“YO DAT SHYT OFF DA RACK SON.”

“FUNNY AZZ VID lolz”

“i love this vid but this prick hellodude619 is a fag. he obviouslt does like the vid if he keeps spamming it”



“57 million views. This is just really sad.”

That’s right, ghostrider5378. It is sad.

As of press time, the video “Crank Dat Soulja Boy Spongebob” had 57,605,818 views. I can only assume that number will have increased by the time that you read this post.

Crank Dat's success is just one more piece of evidence that Youtube, far more than the Paleozoic boobtube, is democracy’s medium. A repository for the mundane, the melodramatic, and the magnificent, with more than 80 million videos (requiring storage space in the terabytes) mere clicks away, youtube sits at the heart of online culture. Since its advent in 2005, it has reshaped the way that we view recorded video and wasted innumerable man hours.

But despite the wide shadow youtube casts across our cultural landscape, it’s only relatively recently that the gatekeepers of high culture—artists, curators, New Yorkers—have publicly given the medium its due.

I can think of two instances off the top of my head.

There was weetube, a hilarious, small-scale piece created by Vancouver's Theater Replacement for Hive 2. Described as "part performance, part parlour game," weetube operated on a simple concept, a pair of actors spit lines culled from youtube comment threads.

Go ahead. Try it with the lines at the top of the page. You won't regret it.

Good?

The second art-house presentation that comes to mind, was at Manhattan's Kitchen Gallery in May 2008. The brainchild of curator Rachel Greene, Artists Using Youtube asked three artists—a new school video artist, a writer for Artspeak, and a sculptor with an MFA from Bush’s alma mater—to curate a personal set of youtube videos, revealing “how YouTube serves as a source of inspiration and distraction for many of today’s contemporary artists.”

The New York Times review of the show considered it a mixed bag. They didn’t like clear themes, pop culture adoration, or videos that weren’t repurposed. They did, however, make an awful lot of fuss about recontextualization and placing “primitive artifacts... in the context of high modernism.” Basically, digging through the digital detritus to discover new sources of meaning.

Nowhere was Soulja Boy Squarepants to be found.

That said, later for wankfests. Toss the pretension. Your picks are your picks!

This week’s challenge, snowjobbers: Curate your own set of three youtube videos, rationale of your choice. Bring it.



Bonus: For those of our readers that have the facebook or email address of one your three contributors (I suspect that’s all of you…), we welcome your contributions. Send a youtube link (1) with a 1-2 line explanation and you may well appear in a special reader-produced post. I await with bated breath, people.