Right on the heels of Vimeo’s successful celebration of itself with their own Vimeo Festival, YouTube came out last night with an exclusive event at New York’s Guggenheim Museum to celebrate the best work on their site.

The event was a celebration of YouTube Play, touted by the company as a “biennial of creative video.” 25 online video pieces were chosen by a star-studded jury to be featured on the site as well as play in Guggenheim museums around the world for the next 4 days. The videos chosen represent a wide range of approaches, from animation, to documentary; live-performance art, to found footage remixes. The event itself was streamed online for YouTube audiences and featured comedian Michael Showalter as host with a musical performance by web-darlings OK Go. Switched has a nice, if critical, rundown of the evening.

The differences in the two events—The Vimeo Festival and YouTube Play—seem emblematic of the of differences between the two companies generally. The Vimeo affair put an emphasis on the videos and the creators, the surrounding events were all geared to fostering skills and knowledge amongst the community which produces the videos. YouTube’s Play biennial was more disorganized on the video front, eschewing categories and exhibiting a certain confusion as to the criteria for how to pick the finalists. The site interface is truly abysmal, which I think reinforces this point. However the event itself was a much more grand affair, befitting the leader of the online video revolution. Aside from the streaming of the event which played out like an actual award show (including some amazing use of the Guggenheim’s iconic space), the partnership with the museum brought a little bit of prestigious art world approval, as did the jury, stacked with luminaries such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Darren Aronofsky, Ryan McGinley, Takashi Murakami, and the Animal Collective among others.

As with Vimeo’s festival, I have trouble swallowing that these are the best 25 videos on YouTube. There is some good stuff though, no doubt, including the previously reviewed I Met the Walrus. You can see the 25 chosen videos (click the ‘jury selection’ navigation tab) as well as clips from last night’s event on the Play website: www.youtube.com/play