Commentary on Kelly Video (by way of example)

So I promised Emily I would post something of substance today. Then I posted the Kelly video. Hardly of substance. And perhaps ill-advised on my part, now that I think about it. But pop culture's pop culture, right? The basic idea of the forum is to share whatever primary texts that are readily available and relatively short with our compadres and to offer some insights on them from time to time. You don't have to comment on everything you post, but you do need to do so a good portion of the time. You might consider linking it to some of the theory we've been reading, or you might use this space as a way to start exploring potential research avenues. If I were going to comment on the Kelly video I posted, I could go at it from several angles. there's the obvious gender issue one, but we haven't hit that section of the syllabus yet, so I will save that for later. I could instead focus on the Kelly phenomenon as one that, like many cultural texts of late, is firmly rooted in the internet culture. The dissemination of these texts (go see Kelly's "Shoes" if you haven't already) has occurred primarily through YouTube, and while the comedian behind them, Liam Kyle Sullivan, has had brief guest appearances on TV, his popularity started and remains strongest because of technological avenues being readily available to the masses in a way that we have only started to see in the last decade. What does this mean for art? What does it mean for art as commodity? What effect might it have on the way cultural texts are marketed? Is TV being threatened by low-budget (yet high-quality, at least in some respects) independent productions? Are we actually seeing a time when the masses create our own entertainment or will it be reappropriated? Lost of questions. Any thoughts?

jlh