YouTube!!! YouTube!!!

Can you believe what you can find on YouTube?

Video Data Bank has begun to post snippets of work by various seminal video artists in their collection on You Tube including Vito Acconci and Lynda Benglis. Video Data Bank, located in Chicago, IL and founded in 1976, is a resource for videos by and about contemporary artists. You can access many excerpts from their collection on their website.

In addition to VDB’s contributions on YouTube you can find others by doing a simple search. I found several Chris Burden’s including this one and this one. Martha Rosler’s “Semiotics of the Kitchen” of 1975 is up. I love this video inside a Richard Serra sculpture. There’s one Shirin Neshat that looks like a bootleg. Better than nothing… There’s also some Laurie Anderson work. I could go on and on...

But beware. Type in someone like Doug Aiken and you’ll get something like this. Then there’s always the fear that instead of high minded pursuits you’ll end up following a string and get stung by something like this….

i agree that it is exciting to be able to view this stuff online, but it is important to remember that many film and video artists have made it very clear how their work is meant to be exhibited, and in most cases online streaming doesn't come close to meeting their expectations. the format in which a piece is viewed has a profound effect on how it is experienced, so much so that one might say that seeing a video or an online stream of a film isn't really seeing it at all.

it might be comparable to seeing a post-card sized reproduction of a very large painting. sure, you can get an idea of what the piece looks like, but have you really experienced the work?

i am not anti-online videos (in fact many of my pieces are viewable online) but i think it is very important that viewers realize that they are seeing a very low quality reproduction, not the work itself.

-matt