That fact is clearly driven home by the excellent New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood in an article published yesterday. "Until recently I had assumed that the 'you' in YouTube referred to anybody but me, maybe everybody but me," writes Isherwood. "Like who? College kids with a compulsive need to procrastinate. Media-obsessives anxious to keep track of the hot new joke or political gaffe. Exhibitionists and their friends. Lovers of humiliation comedy. People with an excessive fondness for the cute antics of their pets. Certainly, this freakish and freakishly large video archive offers plenty of material to sate the appetites of those constituencies. But it also offers a dizzying array of material for addicts of what, for lack of more egalitarian term, I’ll call high culture. Or high-ish culture: I’m talking not just about opera and dance, but also that often derided but enduring enterprise called the Broadway musical."

Isherwood then goes on to highlight a number of rare opera, dance, and theater clips including a seminal 1958 performance by Maria Callas, that he was able to track down on the site. But he also brings his outsider/insider perespective to bear one another interesting point: YouTube, while it does function as a library of all sorts of esoterica, also has no critical filter. "Thus does YouTube create an odd, quantitative equivalence between a relatively obscure Romanian soprano and some of the greats of today and yesteryear. Zealotry of various stripes is the engine that keeps YouTube humming..."