When comparisons between Rose Hobart and fanvid culture arose, everyone seemed awfully quick to relegate both to the outer rims of popular culture.
Cornell's work an obsessive, meticulous piece whose absent narrative repels unsuspecting viewers so accustomed to a lienar story. The fanvids of the anonymous online mass labelled as festishic works of collage porn. The musical choices derided for being so typically 'outsider', but not.
While this is a valid lens to view the relationship between the works, it is unfortunately wrong. These works reflect a greater, innate human trait that epitomises mindless consumerism, but taken to the lengths of almost methamphetamine addiction.
Consider first. Humans have proven time and time again that they have an inevitable instinct to create, or more, to express. Whether it be as commonplace as a shopping list, to the most sophisticated life's work never completed, every day is an exercise in the exorcism of the information we absorb. Education is founded on the principle that there are certain facts and practices a human must know in order ot be a 'productive' citizen. Each fragment of media we consume is distilled and sculpted to regurgitated as our own contribution to the world.
And so, consumerism (that is to indiscriminately ingest almost every piece of everything we come in contact with) can be said to be the chief motivator of human expression. The more input, the more output. Ideally, the output would something wholly individual and original but for the most affected consumers this is an impossible task.
Those who toil arduous hours stitching together television fragments as if it were an elaborate operation, have lost the ability to think outside the narrow context of their consumption but harbour a inflating desire to express themselves. So, fanvid creators communicate in the only language they are truly fluent in, their own consumption. As rebuilding a shrine, or translating the Bible, these creators remodel their devotion according to their own desires. It comes as no surprise then that they pick from the same limited canon of popular music, their individual expression is generated in how they can collage the same pieces everyone else consumes.
They are hardly social outcasts, or even outliers, when communicate and create with the scraps of artless, abundant culture that others pass off as too commercial. They are the final evolution of the consumer.
Cornell, behaving the same decades earlier, demonstrates this same instinct in an environment where cultural absorption is limited by time and space. By drawing fragments from a single widely-received commercial success, Cornell acts just as the fanvid artists do. He is personalising the popular culture for himself, as it is the most truly reflective art form he can find.
Therefore, thus, hence and furthermore, just because something is subcultural doesn't mean it is automatically 'outsider'. Minorities exist at both ends of the social strata, and in this case, we see the very apex of consumerism, where it becomes a language akin to Esperanto.
