at a loss
Hollywood’s special effects have jaded me. When I watch an action movie with a high speed car chase or a sci-fi movie with aliens the special effects do not impress me. Since I am so used to seeing Hollywood effects, I need to remember that video art, avant garde cinema, and other non-Hollywood non-narrative genres should not be compared to or judged against Hollywood.
I have never consciously sat down and compared Brakhage’s work to Spielberg’s work, but if I am not careful then I will forget to take Brakhage’s film for what it is.
Hamburger Banhof has an exhibit up dedicated to video and film artists. None of the works I saw stood out as particularly exceptional, and I am not sure if this is because Hollywood has jaded me, because the work is meant to be understood in a historical context that I do not understand, or because I am simply a tough critic.
Or it could be because I have watched enough video art from the seventies and eighties. I want to see something fresh and new. I want to see what video artists are doing today. I do not know where the future of video art lies. Now anyone with a video camera and a computer can potentially make video art. Before video cameras and editing software became so cheap, it seems that you could just point a camera and something and call it art. But now everyone is pointing cameras at things, thus we must redefine the genre of video art.
Creating a beautiful video requires more that just pointing your camera at something beautiful. This is why I do not think that landscape photographs are beautiful. The scene they depict may be beautiful, but anyone can point a camera at landscape and take a picture. Thus the photo itself is not beautiful.
With today’s video editing software, the average person can create any effect with the click of a mouse. And now I am at a loss for what to write next. Really, I have no idea how to redefine the genre of video art. I just know that we cannot compare today’s video art to the video art of the past because both the qualities and the availability of video cameras and editing software has changed so dramatically over the past thirty years.