Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

The shift from a do-it-yourself ethic towards the ideal of (semi )professional (self )presentation, caused by the ongoing commercialisation of the video platform YouTube, has deeply affected the conceptualizations and aesthetics of popular music-related YouTube channels. Therefore, a critical examination of the platform-specific qualities and potentials of musical participation is due: My paper aims at separating formats and practices of collective expression from those whose socio-technical constitutions reveal disrupted communication lines, thus giving rise to forms of “pseudo-“ or “second-degree” interactivity. Possible reasons for this encompass artistic hierarchies, the normalizing potentials of algorithmic diffusion and performative strategies on the part of “influential” YouTube artists. With a particular focus on YouTube-specific concept music, I am going to refer to the term of “relational aesthetics”, originally coined by Nicolas Bourriaud with regard to art theoretically and practically based on “the realm of human interactions and its social context” (Bourriaud 1998). Following Claire Bishop’s criticism that “it is no longer enough to say that activating the viewer tout court is a democratic act” (Bishop 2004), theoretical adjustments to Bourriaud’s notion of relational art need to be made in order to give more weight to the process of critical reflection upon nonaesthetical relations to worldliness immanent in the artistic outcome. Therefore, examples of reflective relational concept music shall be compared to relational art driven by a “microtopian ethos” of producing “relationships between” in order to shed light on their specific political significance and scope of influence against the backdrop of our functionally differentiated society.