Aaron Graham: Print (Tank), 2013In 2010, Aaron Graham began posting videos called Look at This to YouTube, each one a sequence of shots where he stands in front of the camera and waits a beat before saying the words in the title. He points, then leaves the frame. Sometimes the camera zooms in on what he pointed to. Sometimes it stays still and lets the viewer’s eye find it. The objects of attention include a broom balanced across a puddle, a wire knotted around the crook of a tree, a torn flyer flapping in the wind. They recall the unmonumental sculpture that was trendy at the time—messy assemblages evoking the grit of the city, pieced together from discarded remnants of excessive consumption. But if other artists carefully captured such moments in objects and imported them to the white cube, Graham let them be in their natural habitat. Just by pointing at them he turned them into art, or revealed that they already were.Graham started making Look at This while a freshman at Cooper Union. These videos are good student work—smart as art can be before it’s calcified by professionalism. Graham was working his way through the proposition that art is an experience rather than an object, that the status of art is conferred by the quality of the beholder’s attention rather than by the authority of the institution. In his radical version of the theory that John Dewey articulated in his early 20th-century lectures on “Art as Experience,” Graham said that the artist’s role is not to make objects but to shape attention. Look at This offers a framework for experiencing art. The gallery does that, too. But Graham showed how you could just make such a framework on YouTube, without the institution.This insight situated Graham squarely within a particular moment in the history of art and social media—a moment whose energies were exemplified by the Jogging, a Tumblr-based artist collective that he joined in 2012. The Jogging was founded in 2009 by Brad Troemel and Lauren Christensen