What’s an art form that feels unpopular and pointless, but isn’t?

How did the universe begin? Did the great god Bumba vomit us up, as the Kuba believe? Or did we emerge, as the Navajo think, from a cloud of coloured mist? Or do we listen to the ancient Egyptians who thought the curtain opened on a giant cobra slithering across the oceans?

Perhaps it starts with a computer screen: Milky Way wallpaper, a folder labelled ‘History_Of_Universe’ and a sharp intake of breath. That’s how one of the great video artworks of the 21st century begins anyway. This summer New York’s Museum of Modern Art uploaded Camille Henrot’s ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013) to its YouTube channel. It gives you the birth of the world in 13 minutes.

Henrot’s syncretic pile-up of origin myths is told through a mystery, mostly invisible, cursor, opening and closing videos, windows and websites with the manic energy of a student with two hours to go before exams. The film is contrapuntal — the title riffs off Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge — so you can enjoy its unsettling of the Enlightenment project, or just feast on the digital stream that pours forth, a rushing waterfall of ideas, associations and possibilities, funny, tart, heady, exhausting. The definitive internet experience.

When people ask what the point of video art is, or what is it that differentiates video art from film, show them this. Video art is to film what poetry is to prose. And just as a world without verse would be pretty heinous, so would one that didn’t have space for people to fool around with the narrow rules of narrative cinema.

Not all video is quite so easy to defend. The early stuff can be forbidding.