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From: art reviews Category: Art Date: 12 February 2008 Time: 05:35 PM Review: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/visual-arts//productions/laughing-in-a-foreign-language-38227 This show has had dreadful reviews. It isn't very good but not that much worse than anything else, perhaps people/reviewers just don't like being told what's funny. Lots of video art. Does humour needs time/timing? I think we must soon realise that art video is just really truly and sincerely a very bad medium and that it is time to give it up. The cause of death was youtube or real tv or the cinema, but mainly youtube, and that means there is no need to waste gallery space, to have people queuing for headphones etc, it is just the wrong space for this stuff, I know it is cheap but if we can't afford to transport good art, heavy delicate things, then let's just not put on shows. Video art in all its deadly dull dark space, or projected, or on fiddly tv screen seems like a busted flush, a defunct technology, like why not show loads of slides shows or daguerrotypes or zoetropes or polaroids or whatever. Intrinsically the medium of video doesn't offer that much, neither the beauty of film or the narrative comfort of tv or the throwaway quality of the internet video clip (much better for the one liners which constitute such a major part of the field). Having it in art galleries is just plain silly, an anachronism, where curators haven't caught up and are showing what was around when they were growing up. Video art is dead, you read it here first. and this show isn't that funny or interesting. but what is?