“YouTube turns two this month, which presents a fitting opportunity to decry it. The video-sharing Web site — whose name has come to stand for every other such site on the Web — has clearly emerged as the great new media drain catch, an uncurated museum of everything from dumb home movies to slick commercial calling cards, a behemoth that has gone from being part of mass culture to a mass medium in itself, whose reach, ubiquity and sheer volume of content make it easily dismissible as merely the latest purveyor of trivial, banal, repetitious distractions for an eagerly narcotized booboisie.I recently decided to mark this anniversary by spending two weeks plunging down the virtual rabbit hole that YouTube has cornered the market on. What I found there may shock you. What I found there . . . was art.
Just as early tsk-tskers of such derided mass products as comic books (today they’re called graphic novels), radio (people will stop reading books!), dime paperbacks (people won’t read the right books!) and TV (two words: Paddy Chayefsky) were proven wrong, those who summarily relegate YouTube to the low-cultural ashcan are missing not only its artistic potential, but the artistry that can already be found there.” Continue
