Putting MTV in the MFA

When I was in middle school, there was a television station called “The Box.” A kind of mass-scale precursor to YouTube, it played music videos—chosen entirely by viewers—twenty-four hours a day. If I wanted to see pop at its trashy best (apparently viewers just could not get enough of Eiffel 65’s “Blue”), “The Box” was the place.

“Mirrorball,” a series of four programs of carefully selected music videos screening at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) through Feb. 23, may be the opposite of “The Box.” Quietly, respectfully watching music videos? In an art museum? If nothing else, the Mirrorball series demonstrates just how much the music video’s cultural place has shifted in recent years.

First of all, “The Box” ceased to exist years ago, and while MTV’s TRL is technically still on the air, it’s fallen a long way from the days of Carson Daly and the ceremonial “retirings” of its most popular videos. MTV and VH1 have both devoted themselves largely to reality shows, which are cheap to make and infinitely reproducible. Music videos today just do not exist in a TRL-dominated universe.

A sly reference to these days gone by was included in Saturday’s program. In Jonas & Francois’ ingenious video for the Justice hit “D.A.N.C.E.,” two skinny males walk disinterestedly through a nightclub while eye-popping words, letters, and illustrations dance across their form-fitting t-shirts. For a few seconds, one t-shirt simply reads, “Internet Killed The Video Stars.”

It’s a nifty play on the title of the song that inaugurated the music video era, The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and it’s also so true. Nestled in the warm embrace of MTV, record companies could drop millions on clips in which Mariah Carey could ride jet skis in a wet suit with a plunging neckline. Michael Jackson could seduce Eddie Murphy’s wife in Ancient Egypt over the course of nine minutes. Britney Spears could do it again—on Mars. By comparison, music videos today find themselves without a home.

So in one sense, it’s very nice of art museums to try and give them a new home. More than any other kind of institution, art museums have the power to transform the raw materials of culture into intellectually elevated Works Of Art. The MFA and “Mirrorball” make no bones about these kind of aspirations: “at their best, these music promos have more in common with groundbreaking short cinema than commercial flash.”

But do they really? At last Saturday’s “Global Selection” screening, a few of the videos on display lived up to their high-art billing. Karina Garcia Casanova’s video for the song “Disown, Delete” by the Ensemble featuring Cat Power accompanied Cat Power’s breathy, threatening vocals with grainy, slow-motion video footage of hurricanes in action. As the song swelled to a kind of breathing, desperate mass, the video showed a world pulling itself apart shingle by shingle and branch by branch. Best of all, the video didn’t try to glamorize the performer or interpret the song by adding a story. Instead, the video focused on the sound itself, and it did a perfect job.

Koichiro Tsujikawa’s wonderfully strange video for the Cornelius song “Like a Rolling Stone” was another highlight. To accompany Cornelius’ ambient electronics, Tsujikawa created a detailed, swirling world of archways, pedestals, and many small plastic humans. At the end of the video, the plastic humans turn back into rocks. Of the twenty one videos shown, “Like a Rolling Stone” least resembled “commercial flash.”

In other cases, though, it was clear that a fancy video had more to do with a band’s efforts to construct a particular image of itself. Michael Spiccia’s video for the Jet single “Rip It Up” combined video and animation to little effect. Cut-and-paste style text danced across the screen, pencil sketches of buxom women frantically erased themselves: the whole thing looked like a vulgar high schooler’s notebook collage.

In fact, there’s a whole “Mirrorball” program devoted to animation. While the technique can signify everything from gothic emoting—The Horrors’ “She is the New Thing”—to folksy good-naturedness—Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End”—the videos themselves tend to dissolve into an undifferentiated mass.

More than anything, I kept coming back to the strangeness of watching mass-culture clips in a darkened theater. One of my favorite videos, made by Jonas Odell, accompanied a song called “Ali in the Jungle (version 2)” by a British band called The Hours. The completely animated video adopts the excessive, faux-Victorian, theatrical aesthetic embodied most prominently in the U.S. by The Arcade Fire—think old-timey machines, flickering projector light, and skeletons in top hats.

The song is shameless in its attempts to inspire, with soaring lyrics like “Everybody gets knocked down / How quick are you gonna get up?”, but I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that it has been added to my YouTube playlist.

That’s the thing, though. As gorgeous and ornate as the video is, it’s the song that really matters. And a cheesy pop song works better in a dorm room or car radio than in an art museum theater. “Mirrorball” is a terrific survey of the music video as a genre, but let’s hope that these clips find a stable place somewhere out in the real world.

­—Staff Writer Richard S. Beck can be reached at rbeck@fas.harvard.edu.