Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Museum Quality
This started out with me writing about how the only place that seems to play music videos (other than the YouToogle) these days is museums.Bjork took her claymation-y “Where The Wilds Things” are Choose Your Own Yak-venture to NY’s Natural History Museum. This Jakob Trollback guy spoke at the TED conference and explained what music videos really SHOULD be (and we all know that this is MY gig). His talk is kind of boring and the video is even less fun than that – getting into how typical video fare is ‘reactive’ and has too much ego from the director. Well, directors certainly do have some egos on them, but Mr. Trollback getting golf-applause from a crowd averaging seventeen different minors and majors in various un-employable liberal arts fields for talking about excessive ego seems kind of the pot calling the kettle ‘ashy.’
The videos that succeed in the museum market all have a certain vibe, and so do the clips getting the most exposure at the other end of the artistic spectrum. The clips that get the most eyes on YouToogle seem to be the cheapest and most “guerilla” in style. Both musical and visual. I would assume that the immediacy of low-budget rap and rock stuff latches on to YouTube eyes and ears, maybe because it already looks like the kind of amateur stuff kids are used to watching online.
The current world of video exposure shines a light on the highest brow stuff in museums and the lowest brow with hos being supermanned and sodas on the side via the intranets. Labels are still making videos that live in that middle ground – but they seem to receive less and less exposure all the time.
Music television, whether MTV, BET, Fuse or any of their variants, is that middle ground. With fewer and fewer on-air slots available as music television airs less clips every month – that territory becomes even more valuable. Even if the edges of the music world (both museums/galleries and the Net) have more wide open space, that middle ground is still worth fighting over.
Labels: Bjork, Middle Earth, MTV, music video, YouTube
