Editor’s note: Starting Wednesday, Brooklyn blogger and curator Brent Burket will be curating a three-day YouTube retrospective as part of #TheSocialGraph that mines the insanity of the online video juggernaut to find gems and germs that are sometimes painful to watch but always entertaining. His mission was to present an array of short videos that would give us a taste of the art world there and wait till you see what he has discovered.

Paul Virilio has written extensively about how advances in technology have changed our relationship to time and space. YouTube has been supremely guilty of that crime, AND it’s allowed us to hit repeat when necessary. Um, awesome.

While I’m fascinated by all things YouTube, I’m especially interested in how I’m able to exploit it as an art (and music) fan. It’s a big messy archive that contains both the expected and the unexpected. Expected: artist-posted videos. Not expected: a clip of Karen Finley on Bill Maher briefly interrupted by Opie Taylor talking about capital punishment (I’m definitely pro-VHS button disasters!).

Dealer turned Museum Director Jeffrey Deitch’s strange encounter with a man outside his gallery on the night of Shepard Fairey’s “May Day” show (screenshot via youtube.com/alexrae11)

We’ll start with something sweet — albeit trippy — note on the first night and finally land three nights later with a video that is just downright sweet, but not without its David Lynch reference.

On Wednesday and Thursday we’ll be watching artists’ videos that are professional, fan videos of art that are decidedly not, and a Jakob Boeskov film that is neither and both all at the same time.

Thursday night we’ll be checking out a number of artist-made music videos, more amateur art chroniclers, Doug Aitken’s thievery, and the aforementioned Karen Finley footage that might have been lost to time without the drunken librarian that is YouTube.

Friday night will be the official Night of Mayhem. We’ll start, appropriately with old footage from the Black Metal band, Mayhem from when their singer Dead was, well, alive. It will go downhill from there, continuing with a lost No Wave film classic about suicide, boredom, and necrophilia. Good times!

Appearances will be made by Alice Cooper, Salvador Dali, crazy Slayer fans, and a Marina Abramović tribute set to the worst Eurotrash power ballad you will ever hear. Yeah. It’ll get weird. Not to worry though. In the end we will make ourselves feel better with Jeffrey Deitch getting a fat lip and high school kids singing Hall & Oates.

Hit repeat, YouTube. You make my dreams come true. Over and over again.

Archive & Anarchy will take place on Wednesday, November 17, Thursday, November 18, and Friday, November 19, from 7-8 pm at Outpost Artists Resource (1665 Norman Street in Ridgewood/Bushwick — Foursquare — Google map).

Brent Burket is a writer and curator living in Brooklyn. His blog is called Heart As Arena, and he tweets here. He has a really bad sense of direction.

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