RE: FLUXLIST: What is Video Art?

[Allan Revich]

Title: Re: FLUXLIST: What is Video Art?

Well that goes back again to the fundamental questions:   What is art? What isn’t art? Who gets to decide? Who gets to decide who can decide? How is the decision made? What criteria will be used to decide? Who decides on the criteria? Who has to agree? Who is allowed to disagree?   Labels are always problematic, even though they are often convenient.   Expert consensus seems to be the most frequently applied and accepted means of decision making, most of the time, for most people. But expert consensus is open to the same kind of questioning. i.e. Who is an expert? Who decides? Do all the experts have to agree? What if they disagree? Which expert is right? Can they all be right? Can they all be wrong? How many experts need to agree before there is ‘consensus’?   I have been reading way too much Foucault!   Allan       From: owner-FLUXLIST@scribble.com [mailto:owner-FLUXLIST@scribble.com] On Behalf Of Ann Klefstad Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 3:27 PM To: FLUXLIST@scribble.com Subject: Re: FLUXLIST: What is Video Art?   Thinking about this again, maybe we could make a distinction between “video art” (Paik and others who use the tools of video to make things that present as objects or performances―esp stuff that you couldn’t, for instance, easily put in their entirety on a DVD or tape); and “art video,” which would include stuff like Barney and Viola. Does this make sense? One tends to be about the medium; the other uses the medium. AK On 2/21/06 11:47 AM, "Ann Klefstad" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Well I guess to me video art is tv without commercials. Haha. But I suppose usually it’s used to mean video used to  make something besides narrative, which to some degree wd leave Viola out, but he shouldn’t be left out, so maybe one could say, video that occurs outside the usual means of dissemination of television and movies, which would mean that playing Bollywood videos or episodes of I Dream of Jeannie in a context of heightened attention would constitute video art. Art definitions are always a bit tricky because some people would define art from above, like, by style or by a supposed historical unity that contains a consistent body of production, while (I think more realistically) others would define art as whatever artists do, which is not very consistent and which increasingly tends to include styles and modes from any and all periods of history. Which leaves us with thinking about art defined mainly through where it appears,  how it’s used, and how it’s disseminated―so video art is what people look at in video art shows, and what people do who call themselves video artists. AK On 2/21/06 3:29 AM, "Vai Becker Jason Steve" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hello everybody, I've recently bought Matthew Barney's DVD "Cremaster 3" and saw many reviews claims that it's "video art". I know that Nam June Paik is always associated with this term and sometimes called "Father of Video Art", Some of  Paiks' works are in strict film form (i.e. Zen Film) and some of them are like installation art (i.e. TV Garden, TV Cello), does both count as video art?         I'm quite confused with this term after looking up on Wikipedia, can anyone kindly introduce me this form of art?         Thanks!         Ryan _______________________________________ YM - �x����息 就算你�]有上�W，你的朋友仍可以留下��息�o你，��你上�W�r就能立即看到，任何�f��都�幼呤А� http://messenger.yahoo.com.hk