With YouTube Killed The Video Star (VHS), Arlo Sinclair collapses past and present media revolutions into a single haunting image. A black VHS cassette—rendered with painstaking realism—carries a handwritten label that riffs on The Buggles’ 1979 anthem Video Killed the Radio Star, restaged here for the digital era as “YouTube Killed the Video Star.” The familiar VHS form, once a cutting-edge vessel for home entertainment, becomes a relic overwritten by the rise of digital platforms and streaming culture.

By substituting the YouTube logo into the bricolage of analog design, Sinclair highlights the cyclical nature of technological obsolescence. Just as video once displaced radio, digital media has superseded physical formats, reshaping how content is produced, distributed, and consumed. Yet the painting’s nostalgic surface also acknowledges the lingering cultural aura of VHS—the tactility of tapes, the imperfection of analog playback, and the personal memories encoded in their fragile reels.

The work embodies Sinclair’s broader practice of parodying and recontextualizing obsolete technologies, transforming them into cultural fossils that double as critiques of capitalism and progress. The act of memorializing a VHS tape through oil painting elevates the disposable object into an icon, while the phrase itself carries both humor and lament—a nod to the casualties of technological “progress.”

As with his other 2025 works, Sinclair bridges Pop Art’s appropriation with Urban Contemporary’s social satire. The piece resonates as both a witty pun and a cultural elegy, asking viewers to consider not just what is lost when technologies fade, but what is gained—and at what cost—when the new inevitably replaces the old.