Don’t Watch If You Dislike

On October 13, 2012, from 6.30 to 12.00 PM, the Link Point will open again to present the video screening Don’t Watch If You Dislike, curated by Valentina Tanni: a focus on the explosion of amateur creativity online. On show there will be a series of videos made by un-professional creators adopting, more or less consciously, forms and codes of contemporary art. The curator will be present.

 

 

“Suddenly one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart… and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camera-corder, and for once this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever and it will become an art form.” – Francis Ford Coppola, 1991

 

“Don’t Watch If You Dislike”. For a long time, this was the title of Wendyvainity’s YouTube Channel. Wendy is not a professional artist, she is not famous, she doesn’t take part in shows, biennials and other art events. She doesn’t have a gallery or collectors. What we know about her is that she lives in Australia in Adelaide’s suburbs, that she loves cats, gardening and “free stuff”.

Wendy is one of the many web users that decided to take the risk and show her creative work online. Her creativity doesn’t follow the usual paths: her videos are rough, surreal, disturbing, genuine and inexplicably refreshing. The online amateur is the new “primitivist”. What’s unprofessional, low-definition, unseemly, sometimes extreme and crude seems to bear an higher rate of “truth”. This fashion, the same that brought to success reality shows, spread in any cultural field, and relates to the emergence of a global context in which users become prosumers, and cultural consumption becomes cultural exchange.

This video selection is a small sampling of online amateur creativity, a patchy, vital cultural movement that happens outside of institutional frameworks and that is triggering a new culture, that fights against professionalization and forces us to rethink creativity and its role in society. What’s more surprising, however, is the way these new amateurs make use of aesthetics, languages and codes that belong to high contemporary art, more or less recent: remix, détournement, surreal, subversion of meaning, the collecting and reuse of archive material, the mix of highbrow and lowbrow. An heritage absorbed more or less willingly, but that comes to new life thanks to the wild life blood of the web.

 

Valentina Tanni is an art critic and curator. She is mainly interested in the relationship between art and new technologies, and she often works in multimedia publishing projects. She is one of the founders of Exibart and since 2011 she’s a member of Artribune‘s editorial staff.

She curated the Net section of the art show Media Connection (Rome and Milan, 2001), the exhibitions Netizens (Rome, 2002) and L’oading (Syracuse, 2003) and she collaborates with various digital arts Festivals (Interferenze, Peam). She is currently one of the guest curators of FotoGrafia. Festival Internazionale di Roma (photography and new media section // 2010-2012). She lives and works in Rome.