RIP TRL (or, Has Internet killed the video star?)

November 17, 2008 at 5:44pm | In culture, internet, music, new media, television, video | 1 Comment
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This Sunday, the 10-year run of “TRL” (how long has it been since the show was actually called “Total Request Live”?) on MTV came to an end with the show’s 2247th episode. A New York Times article on the final episode details the performances (Beyoncé, P. Diddy, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake) and the Times Square spectacle (sign-waving, screaming teens corralled behind police barriers) that characterized the final episode, echoing the height of the show’s popularity – the late 1990s and early 2000s, when boy bands dominated the charts and drew herds of shrieking fans outside of MTV studios every afternoon.

Does the end of “TRL” – as Ben Sisario’s Times article hints – mean the end of the reign of the music video, the end of MTV’s hegemony over teen culture? Despite attempts to keep clips under control through DRM and take down notices, music videos and other proprietary content still vanish into the dark corners of the Internet, never to return safely to DMCA-controlled territory – opening up new channels and modes of viewing not available under the auspices of MTV producers. Watching “TRL” constrains the viewer’s access to content; sites like YouTube, however, offer a plethora of related videos, playlists, ads and fan-created content to be browsed at will, a wealth of media and information for the avid pop music fan. The linearity of “TRL” – a slow progression of video clips, guest appearances, performances, contests, news and commercials – pales in comparison.

In other words, in an age of web 2.0 media bombardment – with music videos posted to YouTube and imitated by fans or mashed with the pop-culture-phenomenon-of-the-week, with celebrity gaffes blogged about, discussed in Us Weekly and “The Soup” and then blogged again – the “TRL” format seems quaint, even endearing in its outdatedness. What need is there for new “TRL” appearances when fans have nearly the whole 2247-episode show catalog available at the click of a mouse, to be downloaded, remixed, parodied at will? While this increase in content access allows the target audience of “TRL” (teenage pop fans) greater agency in the production and consumption of culture, it may also decrease the ability of current music/video producers to create truly singular, original or interesting content. As the pop star is subsumed more and more into a field of public property, the music video and the pop single lose their capacity for innovation bit by bit; defining moments in these media risk being drowned out in the general babble.

Then again, with music videos like this one, who can say the age of the music video is over?

Is it better?

November 14, 2008 at 12:38pm | In art, discussion, photography, video | Leave a Comment

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Really nice sculpture and video work by Tom Dale. Added bonus: this guy was in the awesomely-titled show, ‘Is It Better to Be a Good Artist or a Good Person?’ featuring various artists represented by Warsaw’s RASTER Gallery. Here’s an excerpt from the show’s rather-lofty mission statement:

Our focus is on the figure of the artist as a regular or even average man. It’s not just by chance that the exhibition is dominated by portraits and self-portraits of artists. Their authors reflect upon the mission of the contemporary artist and his place in society, but they also share their doubts regarding their own art’s power to influence. Hence, the action of the exhibition takes place between the lure of engaged art and a feeling of the social marginalization of their own art – between a longing for full freedom and the beauty of artistic form, and the basic existential limits of human existence.

So, what do you think, gentle readers: is it better to be a good artist or good person?

(Found via VVORK. Thanks, VVORK!)

Uncreative Advertising

November 13, 2008 at 4:31pm | In culture, literature, video | Leave a Comment

Who knew that Charles Bernstein starred in a series of Yellow Pages ads with Jon Lovitz? What could those ad executives have been thinking? I guess they wanted to secure Yellow Pages as the phonebook-of-choice for the contemporary avant-garde writing set.

BFFs forever!!

Collect Yourself

November 10, 2008 at 5:49pm | In art, culture, internet | Leave a Comment
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This month, Copy Gallery in Philadelphia presented an exhibition of personal collections of objects “gleaned from the darkest dustiest corners of artists from Philadelphia and New York.” The show, curated by Luren Jenison, featured Family Circus books belonging to Andrew Jeffrey Wright, squeaky toys from Adam Wallacavage and ski masks from Ben Peterson, among other things.

Writing on the show in Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof’s artblog, Brandon Joyce (of the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study) characterizes it as “gathered from the private caches of various New York and Philadelphia obsessives.” He goes on to say that “the nice thing about the Collections Show is that it allows us to see the social utility of our imbalanced fascinations. It welcomes obsession; rather than the proportional, reasonable, and loveless way in which we usually hoard our everyday artifacts.”

In this context, “New York and Philadelphia obsessives” clearly comes to stand for “various well-known personalities of the Philadelphia contemporary art scene.” Rather than really “welcoming obsession” and demonstrating “social utility,” the show illustrates the cult of personality that rules the art world in Philadelphia (or, I’d presume, any art scene, anywhere). These collections are not the points of interest in and of themselves – it is the collectors that are (as always) on display. How, for example, can the viewer account for K-fai Steele’s collection of office stationary “gathered from her temp jobs in New York from 2004-2007″ (below) without seeing it as, not a demonstration of personal obsession, but a work of art meant to illustrate the artist’s past employment struggles?

If, as Joyce writes, the desire to collect on display this month at Copy Gallery is really “contingent, weird, and so specific that it seems to land the collector somewhere on the Aspberger’s spectrum,” for the show to really represent the mind of the obsessive collector, it wouldn’t need to justify a sense of artistic value with collections from the hands of established or up-and-coming local artists.

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