Response to Chapter two (Zoe)

What I found most intriguing about this chapter is the continued assertion that television is a destructive and terrible medium. It is destructive in the sense that it’s creation pushed out other forms of art such as theater and cinema (to some extent). Terrible in the sense that it is a commercialized badland that consumes the viewers mind and turns them into a blind consumer. Perhaps the previous statement is a bit fanciful, but the artist of the time did not react towards television as if it was an innocent nuisance, they reacted as if it was and is an active evil. I can’t help but wonder if artists are naturally drawn towards mediums that produce an evil. There is something naturally powerful within television, perhaps it is it’s ability to compel the viewer; the artist appropriated a medium typically used for consumerist propaganda and turned it on it’s head. They used the medium because the viewer would notice the juxtaposition between their own work and the ‘work’ displayed on television. The model of using a certain medium to critique the same medium can also be applied to more contemporary media. The comparison of the emergence of television and the emergence of the internet and social networking, for example, should produce a number similarities in the art world. Perhaps social media art, internet art, post media art will every reach the popularity and strength of message that video art possesses in the 60‘s. Perhaps that will be the second chapter of New Media: Early 21st- Century Art.