See What You Started, Andy Warhol?

One of the things I find disquieting in the high-stakes, wild west shoot-out that is the "high-end" contemporary art scene is the rise of video as an art form. Granted, I admire the work of some video artists. Occasionally it's downright stunning. But a disproportionate amount is self-indulgent, self-important garbage. And what cultural currents, I wonder, have provoked the fascination with entrails, the less technically competent they're filmed the better? The field has the potential to be incredibly lucrative. Museums around the world are snapping up videos for their permanent collections, and anyone with the marketing savvy to make a name for him or herself can sell fifteen-mintes of guts poorly photographed and badly edited, if edited at all, for thousands of bucks a pop. Of course, one must realize that museums don't have to be repositories of the best art being produced at any given period, they just have to be representative of what was going on. In an age in which many artists are the product of ineffective potty-training, it's appropriate for collections to be top-heavy with crap.