BEFORE YOU CAN EVEN WATCH THE GENerally hit or miss online content of MOCAtv you’ll have to navigate through a bombardment of commercials and pop-up ads conjured up by Google and used as revenue for both the Internet giant and MOCA. The newly instated YouTube channel (as of October 1, 2012) divides its dozens of artists—picked out from MOCA exhibitions as well as discovered beyond the institute’s walls (and also dug up from archival footage) —into seven broad sections, each equipped with enough adverts for Robbins Brothers rings and gynecological cancer PSAs to make your head spin. Artist Video Projects, MOCA U, Art in the Street, Art+Music, The Artist’s Studio, YouTube Curated By and MOCAtv Presents all collect and store a myriad of fascinating works that unfortunately lose relevance amongst the sanitized, commercial-friendly walls of MOCAtv’s new format. There are a few exceptions, of course; Ben Jones’ mesmerizing video paintings and Skip Arnold’s “rolling” performance (not to mention his relentless head-shaking skills) stand assuredly on their own. But other works that require context—specifically much of the California video art from the ’70s and ’80s—are marginalized by feebly curated introductions and intrusive, sometimes lengthy pop-up ads.

Click on Ant Farm’s “Media Burn,” for instance, a video installation in which a reconstructed 1959 El Dorado Cadillac smashes into a burning pile of television sets, and you’re faced with three minutes of advertising from mormon.org (you do have the option, thank God, of “skipping” after five seconds). While the “Burn” video itself is quite extraordinary in execution (compiled by Ant Farm), having to watch the Latter Day Saints and Chip Lord share an almost equal amount of screen time is a painful reminder of MOCA’s counterintuitive approach to this brave new world of online media.

A Pillsbury Doughboy advert in which a man bakes a batch of pre-made pigs-in-a-blankets wafts its way into a bare bones interview with artist Eleanor Antin, whose mesmerizing black-and-white piece, From the Archives of Modern Art, struggles to fill the 4×5-inch confines of YouTube’s adjustable video screen. It also plays for an uninterrupted 19 minutes, a trial for online users accustomed to longer videos broken into smaller, five- or so minute sections. And for all of Antin’s humorous deconstructions of vaudeville’s past, her lengthy interview at the start of the segment is blandly structured and directed with little fanfare by Peter Kirby. He makes no attempt to build up her works or ease the viewer into the specific stylings of her videos. There’s also something inherently undignified about anti-establishment artists like Antin, Martha Rosler and Ant Farm floating side-by-side amongst Lego Mini Figures, Sponge Bob Square Pants re-runs and countless other youth-oriented advertising ploys. While MOCAtv has no problem flaunting advertisements before, after and in-between each video, the channel still insists on presenting its content with as little humor or idiosyncratic stylings as possible. <

Unsurprisingly, Björk’s trippy music video Mutual Core, and filmmaker John Hillcoat (of The Proposition and The Road fame) and photographer Polly Borland’s abstract Berlin it’s all a Messreceive the highest numbers of views on the site; their accessible fusion of pop and art lend the casual clicker a satisfaction that many of the other less mainstream vids fail to produce. There is also the strangely intriguing Feast of Burden, a web series that heartily subverts the Girls-centric twenty-something crowd with a bizarre, Lynchian story involving a group of obnoxious Silver Lake hipsters converging for the world’s weirdest dinner party. Equipped with subjective point of views and tantalizingly short time spans per episode, the show’s irreverence and dismissal of logic keeps us engaged, albeit uncomfortable. But for the most part, MOCAtv stubbornly avoids playful and youth-centric fare in favor of straight-faced gallery interviews and robotically compiled short docs that do little more than matter-of-factly showcase each artist’s respective creative routine.

Their coverage of street art and studio work bear unfortunate resemblance to PBS’ mind-numbing Art21 in that they depend solely on the artist’s words along with muted observation of their process to make the videos function. Add to that the onslaught of commercials for Intel, Nintendo 3DS, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, etc., and what you have, in essence, is the worst of both worlds: the sanitized academia of the MOCA institute mixed in with the assaultive, in-your-face advertising structure and flavorless aesthetics of the YouTube channel.