John Menick

When someone asked Orson Welles whether he wanted to make movies for a mass audience (instead of marginal art films like F for Fake), he sighed out what is probably one of his few honest responses: “I’ve been looking for a mass audience all my life.”

I remembered Welles’ lament while reading Rob Storr’s thoughts on video art over at Frieze yesterday, especially when the former MoMA curator pushes artists and dealers to realize “that a culturally and, from an financial standpoint, numerically significant constituency for video art exists.” Storr then goes on to say, “the time has come for video to return to its technological roots in order to find its wider public.”

Storr is dead-on when talking about a need for — or at least a possibility of — a larger market. But the medium is not the answer here. Or to put it another way, when talking about cinema, one can not only mention a single medium. To take a slightly dated example, Danny Boyle’s brilliant 28 Days Later was shot on the Canon XL-1s, the same cameras used to shoot many years worth of video art, but why does one work captivate millions and make millions of dollars more, and another whole category of works gets “relegated” to the sidelines? To answer in a few words: dramatic narrative, cultural conventions, marketing, audience expectation, and distribution. Not to mention the fact that cinema can’t be reduced to the medium on which a particular “film” is shot. Any DV film passes through a whole number of media: first mini-DV, then sometimes 35mm, then to VHS, DVD, and onwards and outwards to ipods, quicktime videos etc, etc. Not to mention the millions spent on marketing.

The topic is too complex to cover here, but some answers to Storr’s questions might be found in a whole range of new marketing, audience, and political theories. Speaking of mass audiences can be tiring, especially if one takes on the simplistic binary thinking that “mass” is “popular and good,” while “small” is “elitist and bad.” The jury is still out (and the book not even published) on Long Tail theory, but perhaps the best rule of thumb is that some works are made for an audience of three or four, while others for three or four million. Just because an artist might sell to a few collectors a work that is only viewed by a few thousand people over 10 years doesn’t mean that the work is not economically viable or unseen. It’s a niche market, that’s all. If you want a larger market, you have to change a lot more than the medium.

Then again, we could all be wrong, and video artists do resemble the lone survivor of 28 Days Later.