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).
The Latest
They Managed to Mess Up an Art Heist Movie
There must be a lesson in Vasilis Katsoupis’s film Inside about the vacuousness of the art market or the claustrophobia of exhibition spaces — I just don’t care.
Ten Painful Stories of the Dutch Colonial Slave Trade
The Rijksmuseum’s traveling show strives to remind us that we are all, in some way, a part of this chapter of human history, whose legacy continues today.
The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation Presents The Feminine in Abstract Painting
Curated by Jennifer Samet and Andrea Belag, this group exhibition in NYC explores the feminine through aesthetics, as opposed to identity or gender.
Textured Histories at Shiprock Santa Fe
The Santa Fe gallery features Indigenous textiles and jewelry from the early 19th century to today.
Renaissance Portrait of “Ugly Duchess” Likely Depicts a Man
A curator at London’s National Gallery believes the subject of painter Quinten Massys’s painting “is most likely a he.”
NYU Steinhardt Opens 2023 MFA Thesis Exhibitions
Taking place at 80WSE Gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village, Part I is on view from late March through April while Part II opens in May.
Hokusai’s “Great Wave” Makes a Splash at Auction
An edition of the iconic woodblock print broke records when it sold for $2.8M this week.
MTV’s The Exhibit Is Back With an Inflatable Dolphin
Episode four, in which artists tackled themes of justice and injustice, was the most lifeless of the reality TV show so far.
Miniature Worlds: Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson, Yayoi Kusama
Through small-scale works, this exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York examines Cornell’s prominent role in the lives and careers of Johnson and Kusama.
Florida Principal Ousted Over “Pornographic” Michelangelo Sculpture
Parents complained that the famous sculpture was shown to their sixth graders.
Tickets to Sold-Out Vermeer Show Are Going for Hundreds
The online resale market for the Rijksmuseum’s smash exhibition is booming, with tickets selling on eBay for over $2K.
The Wider World and Scrimshaw
On March 28, join the New Bedford Whaling Museum online and in-person for a symposium on global carving traditions from across the Pacific Rim.
Three Looted Antiquities at the Met Repatriated to Turkey
Nine other repatriated works were seized from Met Trustee Shelby White, whose collection was subject to a criminal investigation.
Required Reading
This week, the world’s lightest paint, Pakistan’s feminist movement, World Puppy Day, and were some of Vermeer’s paintings created by his daughter?
Artists Meeting does curated youTube events. We started doing these in 2008. Check out some documentation and youTube tryptych links here —
http://www.artistsmeeting.org/index.php/Exhibition-Documentation/
Yup, we know this isn’t the first time, but we do think a YouTube “retrospective” was in order for #TheSocialGraph. Hope you’ll join us for one of the nights.
my head is hurting already, and I’m not even there yet.