Speculated a few months ago that my list of YouTube favs would "shrivel in the institutional spotlight" if they were ever singled out for gallery presentation. This proposition will not be put to the test tonight at Postmasters Gallery. Nevertheless I stand by the assessment that the work is "no-budget, sincere, incomprehensible, vague, 'weak,' anti-YouTube, no-style, slight, non-corporate, etc (but also brilliant)."
Stayed out of this discussion of "art" videos vs freaky YouTube moments, because Will Brand's interest in "art" video as a frame fails to excite. The freaky stuff wins hands down, let's move on. Most of the teleclysm favs consist of medium-to-poor translations of other expressions (film, vintage computer art, bad Poser animations) that have been submitted to YouTube's crapshoot of a compression/transcoding process. It's hard to seriously analyze anything for artistic merit when 90% of the success of a video is negotiating The Man's cruddy (but exigent) software.
Over the years the majority of my links to YouTube have been to music: initially recycled MTV and lately those vids where people post a favorite song with little or no visual accompaniment. Am fascinated by the way YouTube is morphing into "the people's iTunes" (i.e., a less evil version of iTunes), during this strange moment of copyright limbo where the majors haven't figured out how or whether to shut it down. Probably many musicians are delighted to have people listening to 10-, 15-, 30-year old songs.
Let's end with this twitter convo (high profile names removed):
the approved school of net art: collecting youtubes and making the producers look like idiots in comparison to your own Barthes-like self
are you saying thats a good thing? or a bad thing? or just how it is?
was just having late convulsions in reaction to certain collections
Update, 2013: I closed the "Teleclysm" YouTube account over the "unitary identity" issue and general Google weirdness.