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.

I'm not sure that the video's inclusion in the exhibit necessarily indicates that the art world overlooks vidding when women have been making vids for decades, but hails it as art when a man does it. From swanswan's description, Young's video sounds very much in the tradition of decades of art that appropriate and remix film and video, sometimes incorporating music. Given that the video predates YouTube, it seems much less likely that the artist would have been aware of or exposed to vidding, and more likely that he would have been aware of works such as Dana Birnbaum's late '70s classic Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, which I posted about a while back -- another video that engages with gender through clips of an iconic superhero.

Nor would he be the first video artist to use the music video form -- and even as remixes go, Jillian McDonald's "Me and Billy Bob" predates "It's Not Easy" by at least a year. And it's not surprising that artists would independently turn to the music video form -- especially given that Robert Longo, best known for his "Men in the Cities" series, also made music videos, and arthouse film directors like Spike Jonze and Michael Gondry got their start making music videos. If anything, it's almost predictable that art world figures would play with music videos as a medium (think, say, Roy Lichtenstein and comic books or Richard Prince and advertising).

So I'm not sure how to answer swanswan's question: "Is it a good thing to see the same practices we use (and by we I obv mean the fannish community, never having vidded a damn thing myself) being lauded and officially recognised? Or is it crappily yet another example of a mainstream male (however "mainstream" this guy can be said to be) getting recognition for a style we've been doing for years, and to a vastly higher standard?"

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.