In my opinion, AMV's could be or not be considered art. I don't really care.
For me is just a hobby. I never liked or supported that much those videos where
they take anime characters to tell a story. I prefer original animations in that case.
Took the words out of my mouth.
There are a ton of videos that you talk about, I find that they mostly come out of the Russian AMV community though. Even on the akross.ru right sidebar, most of those videos are the "story" type.
For me, I dgaf about anime at all frankly. When I edit amvs my goal is to interpret the song, through atmosphere, concept/story, but mainly just the sounds of it, which people don't get but that's what I aim for (put simply, matching the motion of a scene in an anime clip to the music)? I don't do this all the time since editing amvs is also a hobby to cure boredom, but that's what it is for me. Obviously + a concept too though, since no concept at all is just boring as shit, but a concept is very loose. It can be scenes of happy people and that's a concept.
So I tend to not enjoy amvs that focus so much on telling their own story since they tend to stray from the story of the song and only focus on the atmosphere of it, and because good stories aren't told in under ~4 minutes and by using a limited range of sources that aren't even your own, at least in my opinion. I just think morphing the clips and all that jazz, effects n stuff, isn't really art at all. Art to me is original 100%? All art is of course influenced, nothing never takes inspiration from something, but I don't think art is comprised 100% of sources that you had no creative control over.
That being said, I appreciate immensely those that can do it, like Umika and such. Some people are good at it, most aren't. I'm going to enjoy an amv if it's good regardless of whether it's a "story" amv or not though. Whether or not I enjoy it is dependent on a lot of things.
So there's several points on both sides I agree with because I tend to fall in an "idc" attitude about amvs anyhow. If they're taken too serious I don't like it. Amvs to me are not serious to any degree. The thought makes me cringe. To be so specific about what I like in an amv would be weird to me. I tend to enjoy some things more than others, specifically sentimental videos, and dislike others more than some, like the "original story" amvs, but to say one specific thing in an amv is better without a doubt like a "story" would be taking it too seriously imo.
Also I didn't read half the comments in this thread, like the first 3, so if I made a point that seems to directly confront something you said, it's probably not true.
But once again, that's not what I'm arguing. What I should say is I feel that these types of videos don't get noticed like videos that use a bunch of video effects with no sort of deep underlying story at all.
True that. If there's one type of amv I hate it's mindless-effect videos.