Forerunners of YouTube - Art Institute of Chicago's video collection is unofficially collated online by a grad student

American artist William Wegman is probably best known for his photographs of Weimaraners. For decades now, he has been able to coax his pet dogs to pose stoically before his lens, offering a steady, curious, tolerant gaze to the camera despite the oddball scenarios in which they are placed.

Less common are Wegman's early video works, including Two Dogs and Ball, which is part of the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. The film is less than three minutes long. In it, a pair of Weimaraners sit calmly side by side, their eyes locked on the movement of a tennis ball that someone is handling off-screen. The dogs are rapt and their "performance" is mesmerising, a little creepy - and hilarious.

The video has been watched more than 73,000 times on YouTube, where it feels like a natural fit because, well, dogs.

It is one of several works of film and video you can find online that are part of the Art Institute's collection. Only recently have they been organised - unofficially - into a single YouTube playlist, courtesy of Chicago-based critic Kevin B. Lee, who is pursuing graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This is not the first time Lee has found himself hurtling down a YouTube rabbit hole. Last year he made a film called Transformers: The Premake, which is a cunning critique of the blockbuster and its director Michael Bay, made up of video scraps shot by fans stalking the film's on-location action.

With his latest project, Lee has uncovered a fascinating collection of short abstract art films, almost all of which are impossible to view at the museum because they are not on any kind of permanent display.