YouTube: great for an exhibition, but is it art?

Online videos go on show in the Guggenheim, writes David Usborne

It's going on at Guggenheim Museums all over the world this weekend, as well as inside your laptop, iPad or smartphone. It is the YouTube generation gone wonderfully, wildly creative. Both competition and exhibition, this is an explosion of online video art from all around the world.

It is also, of course, a clever marketing gambit. YouTube has partnered with the Guggenheim Foundation to launch the world's first professionally curated search for short online films that are more than just your family home videos. It attracted no fewer than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries.

The winnowing process has already selected 125 entries which are being presented for public consumption for "A Biennial of Creative Video". They can be viewed in booths in Guggenheims in New York, Berlin, Venice and Bilbao and also at YouTube.com/play on line.

Doing the work is a jury of 11 judges, including film-maker Darren Aronofsky, the indie rock group Animal Collective and the Japanese visual artist Takashi Murakami. Twenty winners will be announced next week.

It is unfamiliar ground for the Guggenheim. Nancy Spector, chief curator of the Guggenheim Foundation, said she and her colleagues were gripped by "the idea of looking at how online video is emerging as an art form in its own right". How important an art form it might become she does not know. "It's a question, not a declaration. So it's worth exploring."

Some of those videos in the last round are well known YouTube hits already, or are by artists who already have significant followings. The astonishing OK Go music video "This Too Shall Pass", featuring a crazily ambitious Heath Robinson contraption. As is an example of the astonishing time-lapse work of Australia's Keith Loutit, who turns humans into miniature toys. The New York-based troupe Improv Everywhere offered video of their Human Mirror event, featuring pairs of identical twins sitting opposite each other on either side of a subway carriage in identical clothes and poses.

Much of the work, however, was submitted by amateurs who are discovering that online video can deliver an audience for their video whims. Some display enormous levels of sophistication, while others are pleasingly simple, like Andrew Nicholas McCann Smith and Rob Stockman's "Home" featuring an old woman trying unsuccessfully to spoon soup into her mouth.

"The selection is diverse in technique, subject matter, geography, and professional status, which reflects the increasing accessibility of new media technologies around the world," Ms Spector says. "We believe the shortlist reveals the abundance of creative energy this project evoked."

Tallie Maughan: All you need is an idea, not a degree from film school

Comment

I didn't know how other people would feel about it, but I did know I was proud of our film – a music video for my boyfriend Tommy Wallach's song – and could watch it over and over again. So we just thought we should enter it for everything going. But to make the shortlist? I had absolutely no anticipation that that would happen.

And, of course, it makes such a difference to get shortlisted for an award like this. It gets more people to come and view our video, it makes it easier to get other people involved in your projects, and it makes it easier to realise your ideas in future. This is just the beginning.

To know that something you felt strongly about when you were making it has been carried through to the end, seen by judges, and then chosen to represent what they think is good about online art – that's wonderful. But the prize isn't the main thing. I always feel about YouTube that there are no barriers for people to see your work – that it's meritocratic. If your work is good enough it will be picked up. If you have a strong vision, you can get your work out there even if you don't have a degree from film school. All you need is an idea. And for me that's unique.

Tallie Maughan is the co-director of 'Whisper'