This week I found myself talking about artist Jayson Musson’s “Art Thoughtz” again. The series of videos are done in a classic YouTube style, with low grade effects, text, and even complete with a low resolution webcam video of Jayson Musson in his persona “Hennessy Youngman”. The videos themselves challenge the art world with humor and exaggeration, spliced together with more seriously delivered well thought out critiques. Musson’s critiques on the history and present state of art bring a fresh level of awareness with a modern way of sharing and creating,YouTube. Critiques are presented in a way that does not shy away from the low brow conventions of the internet but they are embraced and satirized, though shown to be just as ridiculous as much of art’s history. It becomes apparent that these videos humorously lecture a lot about mediums and art culture, but in the modern and very meta stage of the 2010’s, this is clearly art in itself.
Hennessy Youngman's "Art Thoughtz episode on institutional critique.
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token.
Mark Rothko, Statement
I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.
Mark Rothko, The Romantics Were Prompted...
Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making it out of ourselves
Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now