Well, this is almost exactly the function of a genuine critic of the arts. It is his business to provoke the reaction between the work of art and the spectator. The spectator, untutored, stands unmoved; he sees the work of art, but it fails to make any intelligible impression on him; if he were spontaneously sensitive to it, there would be no need for criticism. But now comes the critic with his catalysis. He makes the work of art live for the spectator; he makes the spectator live for the work of art. Out of the process comes understanding, appreciation, intelligent enjoyment—and that is precisely what the artist tried to produce.

If you go into a bar tonight, and you listen to the conversations, you will hear men and women describing to each other how they feel about someone else, or how someone else they know feels about someone else. Inner feelings are everything. They’re talking like a novelist’s description. They’re saying, “well, what he felt was that she crushed him somehow. And therefore, it was sort of a terrible destructive thing that she was doing to him, because she was, like, blanking him off.” What you hear will be like that. That’s like a novelist describing someone from inside their head. That fixation on the primacy of individual experience and feeling is not going to go away. But we’re beginning to realize two things: first, that this individualism is limited, and second, that when things get tough economically, socially, and politically, and you are on your own, you feel isolated, and you feel weak.

If you can’t make aesthetic judgements about these creations, then you’re still a drive-by rube checking-out the Tumblr. You can’t grow teeth until you chew these things over for yourself.

I appreciate how sites like Youtube assign the same context to all video material. There’s something cruel and reductive about it, but it also makes obscure things accessible. I feel like the divide between short-form cinema and video art is often artificial and maybe the internet can help erase that divide.