Via giandujakiss and otw_news , swanswan posts about going to a gallery show in Ireland which included "a video installation - it had its own special darkroom, and a wall-sized screen - which contained clips from the original Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, set to the music of the band Five for Fighting. In other words, a fanvid."

The video, "It's Not Easy" (2004) by South African artist Ed Young, doesn't appear to be online. Though admittedly my Google Fu was challenged by the discovery that he shares a name with an evangelical pastor who runs a megachurch in Texas and challenged his flock "to strengthen their unions through Seven Days of Sex" last November.

( Monday lacks a snappy cut link text )

In the case of Young's video, I doubt that what's being specifically lauded is its viddishness -- that is, his use of the music video format per se with reedited clips from a mainstream media source -- much less its technical merits relative to those of vidders. Rather, the video's place in the show reflects its relative success in using the established tools of appropriation art in the service of an established thematic interest in representations of masculinity. In other words, Young succeeded in making something that recognizably looks and works like an art video that happens to take a form extremely similar to vidding. And again, that's almost predictable to the extent that many of the core practices of vidding arguably date back much further than the '70s. This blog post from an Australian film course even explicitly makes an interesting case for Joseph Cornell's famous Rose Hobart (1936) as a proto-vid.

It seems obvious to say that the vids that do things and the vidders that say things that the art world is able to recognize as congruent with its own interests, values, histories, aesthetics, and discourses will be the ones most likely to achieve recognition from the art world. Then again, the art world is nothing if not insular, narcissistic, and tautological. It's more difficult to imagine how the art world might take up vidding as a form and community with its own interests, values, histories, aesthetics, and discourses deserving of recognition on its own terms, rather than cherrypicking specific works and creators as artworthy with at best a semi-condescending nod to their roots and traditions. One potentially instructive historical comparison might be how the art world has absorbed other forms originating outside of its orbit such as graffiti art.