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THE 10-HOUR VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE are, at base, a joke. For one thing, they point out how short most popular YouTube videos are. We had become used to consuming video entertainment in 30-, 60-, 90-, or 120-minute blocks to such a degree that in the five years preceding YouTube's explosion, the music video viewing had started to decline. YouTube brought back the short film, and if the film in question often features a cat playing a keyboard, that doesn't change the fact that one- or two-minute pieces of video now occupy central places in our cultural imagination. What the 10-hour clip does is essentially make a supercut of our viewing history. By leaving out all the hours we weren't watching "Nyan Cat," our experience of multiple viewings of the same clip is compacted into a single timespan. It points out the ubiquity of these videos by showing how frequently they can be repeated in the space of, say, a little more than three back-to-back viewings of The Godfather.

The point of these types of hyperlong works, then, isn't so much to offer an alternate viewing experience to normal art, but to get across an idea that actually doesn't take a 10-hour sitting to grasp. Ten-hour videos are meaningful because, like, holy shit, that's a lot of fucking Nyan Cats; they fall into the same "funny for no reason I can possibly articulate" category of web bricolage as "YouTube poop" and the "shreds" videos. The sentence "Nyan Cat repeated for 10 hours" isn't funny, but a video demonstrating that sentence very much is.

In this way, they're conceptual art. (Not good conceptual art, but classification is not evaluation, after all.) As Sol LeWitt put it in his definition of conceptual art, "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." Indeed, the idea of the 10-hour video was robust enough of a concept that it's been taken up by many successors to the anonymous originator, and if there's anything that would make conceptualists happy, it would be both the identity of the artist and the works themselves vanishing even as the concept becomes more visible. Aesthetics, so the theory goes, becomes less important than ideas. Even if you never hear "Found a Star," that you are reading about it here makes it a data-point in your understanding of the world, for better or for worse. You live in a world where some people decided to make a six-hour song, and in which other people paid to listen to it.

Indeed, most of the 10-hour YouTube clips aren't very rewarding to watch. Something like "Empire" has variation, even if it's not very much variation and it happens very slowly. When you copy and paste a clip, you just repeat it, sound-for-sound, pixel-for-pixel, so there's nothing waiting in the 999th minute that wasn't there in the first. Granted, some of them, like "Rainbow Bunchie 10 hours," are pretty mesmerizing in their simplicity, but it doesn't really take 10 hours of your life to become mesmerized, and as some commenters imply, watching the entire thing might cause you to have some sort of mental break. Others, like "Justin Bieber shot on CSI 10 hours," work for a bit longer since the parts of the clip are repeated in semi-random order, but your brain keeps waiting for the resolution of Bieber falling, and its non-arrival is quickly exhausting. The videos that come closest to the traditional purpose of hyperlong art are, like "Epic sax guy 10 hours," those that take a small piece of dense footage and force you to spend a long time contemplating it.

In Air Guitar, Dave Hickey writes about the experience of watching another Warhol film, "Haircut," a 27-minute silent clip of a man getting his hair trimmed in real time. Gathered together with his friends, Hickey's audience at first made fun of the film, but slowly became more and more drawn into it, until, Hickey says, each snip of the scissors became an incredibly tense moment. By taking what would normally be a brief moment in any narrative film, the action of someone getting a haircut without any dialogue, it forced them to really focus on that one action, narrowing their sense of meaningful time from the broad to the very small. "When the lights came up," Hickey wrote, "we were all looking at one another with new eyes."