TV is Art, or The Medium is the Medium

The first generation of "television babies" is now reaching maturity.

The average American home has one and one-third television sets; American homes have more television sets than bathtubs, refrigerators or telephones; 95 percent of American homes have television sets; portable video-tape equipment for home use is available to the general public right now...The generation which has grown up with television and other sophisticated media has evolved a new perception in processing information.

A process-level analysis of the art experience is concerned with art as a process of perception, a way of experiencing, how one sees rather than what one sees. Therefore the concept of art becomes an inclusive one, and everything is or isn't art, according
to one's experience...Looking at TV for fixed periods of time, as if in a theater of
movie, denies its function as a continuous flow of assorted information to be processed by the individual according to his perception. Television can become part of a regular like style, a fabric of individual perception, a super-real reflection or the city, country, world.

Television has made multiple focus acceptable; as a result we can see many different focal planes all at once. We can go from one focus to another and refocus all at once. When you focus your eyes from one thing to another, it’s necessary not to keep any one thing in focus too long, otherwise you can’t immediately change to another."

Art, therefore, becomes a two-step process-formulation or creation of an idea
and communication of this idea -- and the two steps are inextricable related. At the level of communication, the importance of the idea is linked to the number of people who can experience the idea. So it is quite logical for the artists to seek out the greatest audience possible, and to wind up in the field of television...In communicating information, television not only translates images, but transforms them into a unique and powerful superreality which has an independent life.

The above are quotes from TV-The Next Medium, by John S. Margolies(Full Article: ), which was a review of the 1969 exhibition, TV As A Creative Medium, which notably was the first show dedicated to television and video art in the US, and also marked the end of Kinetic Art. I thought it would be interesting to look at television specifically used for art in conjunction with all of the musical performances and bizarre televised interviews that we've been watching. More on this later, though, because I am being beckoned to watch If..., which I highly recommend if you haven't already seen it. Talk about a revolution.