Avant Garde

While reading the article "Avant-Garde" I was preparing to slam my head against my desk, and felt a potential correlation to the reason why newspaper sales are slowly on the decline. I by no means feel as though the author Virginia Heffernan is a bad writer, or even had trouble expressing herself. I just personally found her argument to be a bit of stretch, and by argument I'm referring to her belief that Youtube has become a platform for art. I understand that there are many interpretations of art, and I respect everyone's opinion on what is art, but I do not believe that a large portion of what is loaded to Youtube (99%) to be art or remotely artful.

The single part of the article that bother me the most is when the author says, " But what's surprising is how little the homemade videos resemble the pro goods". A large amount of professionals do not use Youtube at all, and when they do its only for promoting purposes because Youtube does have a large audience.

Heffernan noted that the "haul" and "fail" videos often attracted 100,000 views, but failed to mention the way that Youtube. The way that Youtube functions as a website can only be described as a snowball effect. The more popular a video gets, the more the video is recommend to viewers who could be watching a video of a completely different subject. On top of that, there's a large number of videos that get popular just because they have a similar name to another popular video. For example there was an incredibly popular song this summer called Ms. Officer. My friends back home made a remix of the song, that had nothing to do with the topic other song except for the fact that they used the same chorus. Just by having the same name, this video that my friends made received 331,424 views!?!?!

Honestly I feel as though at the beginning of this response I had a very concise point about this article, but now it's mainly become an angry rant. All I can truly say is that I strongly disagree with this article.