Youtube Nation: Guggenheim Chimp Rape

When I first heard that the Guggenheim Museum wanted to start showing Youtube videos at their various branches around the world, my initial reaction was similar to whenever CNN does a feature on an Internet trend. I sounded to me like another aspect of the old mainstream jumping on board the Internet bandwagon a bit too late. But then I got to thinking about the way the fine art community usually approaches new media and I was won over. It took half a century before film was taken seriously as art by all but a few scrappy Europeans and maybe one Japanese guy, so the fact that the Old Guard of modern art wants to include Youtube a mere five years after its invention is pretty encouraging.

That doesn't mean I don't have my concerns about GuggenTube. I severely doubt the stodgy folks of the meatspace museum world will be willing to depict the Internet as it actually is. The goal of the project, officially called Youtube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video, is to compile as many as 200 unique submissions to Youtube and preserve them in Guggenheim museums the world over. Ostensibly the aim of YPABoCV (doesn't that just roll off the tongue?) is to motivate Youtubers to up their game and make better videos than they're currently making. For those of you who have been paying attention to the way the Internet does just about anything, you should recognize a can of worms when it's being opened.

I've been a rah-rah supporter of what Youtube does for a while now but I also haven't turned a blind eye to its uglier, more Internet-y side. There are certainly a number of very impressive contributors to the site who make content that is often more interesting, amusing and informative than what's playing on television these days, but there are also thousands of videos that document some of the most insane crap currently happening on planet Earth. I submit, for the approval of all the quaintly high-minded folks at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the first step in a functionally endless series of videos depicting non-human animals raping other non-human animals (not safe for work, dummies). This is the true face of Youtube, or at least one aspect of its beautiful and terrifying presence on the Internet. You may ask yourself, "How did that monkey get into an enclosure with a goat in the first place? What function could that possibly serve?" We denizens of the World Wide Web know the answer to that and it doesn't reflect very positively on our species. Like so much of the content on Youtube, it happened because someone thought it would be amusing to film it and put it on the Internet.

Strange as it is to say so, we may very well be on the cusp of the Internet's transformation into something more legitimate, something less insane. At best, the Youtube Play project will do for Internet video what the World's Fair did for technological and culinary innovation or what the de'Medici family's patronage did for Renaissance art. It may lift greatness and inspiration from obscurity and usher in a new era of creative expansion in a medium that has heretofore been a thoroughly democratic exercise with a ramshackle aesthetic. The question is, do we want to preserve the homemade goofiness of Youtube or do we want it to transform into the home of the creative elite?