Television and Video Art

What caught my attention from this chapter is they was Rush describes how the many “sides” of television are interacting and how that lead to the development of video art, especially conceptual video art. The beginning of the chapter Rush shows us how the many "sides" of television are interacting. The struggle between news, advertisement, cinema and video art is interesting because they were all competing for a place in the new culture dominated by television. Video was the newest medium at the time shared by people with all different motives, (the government, artists, news broadcasters, commercial companies) as compared to sculpture which is a medium used almost strictly by artists. Rush describes this “invention” of the Media as one of the initial targets for video artists who tried to sway the use of television from commercial companies towards artists, criticizing advertisements and challenging the control television had over the public. As I was reading I found myself asking the question is advertising art? or is footage of the war art? And Rush makes it known there is a difference between being art and being artistic and explains how the the earliest forms of video art explored the distinction between art and artistic by alternative news and anti-advertising TV commercials. In the following video, Balderssari uses art to explain LeWitts definition of conceptual art: 

This is interesting because it focuses on the idea of being irrational to present a logical idea, which to me is something that helps distinguish video art and artistic videos. Another thing separating commercial video and video art is the desire to mimic reality. Artists, such as Peter Campus in "Three Transitions" [1973] challenged this by showing how reality can be manipulated through video and how that is a metaphor for the reality of self: