Monday, November 15, 2010

The Aesthetics of Narcissism

Although the article was long and drawn out, it provided many examples of video art in support of its main point that this type of art is "narcissistic". Outside of the art realm, the majority of a video camera's use is definitely to record people, but I'm not sure if I would call this tendency narcissistic. Sometimes people record themselves for blogs, tutorials, etc., but usually people record other people rather than themselves, and it's usually for documentation purposes. In the art world, video art does not always focus on human figures as its subjects, but a fair share of it does. And those that do always convey some type of human emotion that could not be as explicitly expressed through any other subject other than a person. When an artist creates a work relevant to humans and human emotions, what better way to present it than through another human? Any kind of complex psychological state of mind is almost only relatable to humans because no other animal, as far as we know, can think as in depth as we can. So aside from taking an abstract or metaphorical path in creating a video artwork, how else would one directly show emotion?
That might have been a bit of a tangent, but I just can't get the idea through my head that video works featuring humans are narcissistic. I can definitely see where the idea is coming from, but I do not entirely agree with it.

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