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Feedback: Television against Democracy
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Review
"An ambitious exploration of television at midcentury as it created its mythology of character, its rewriting of politics, and its illusions of feedback, Feedback grips the reader as well with challenging analyses of image creation, proliferation, and circulation today. Drawing on a wild history that includes psychedelia, blaxploitation, video art, guerrilla TV, Nam June Paik, Hubert Humphrey, Lucille Ball, and Melvin Van Peebles, Joselit inspiringly entreats the reader to 'assess the image ecology... and respond to it' and 'use images to build publics' now." Maud Lavin, Professor, Visual and Critical Studies and Art History, Theory, and Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
"An elegant, passionately argued, and crucially important rallying cry.... There may be hope that this call to arms for the fields of art history and criticism will not go unheeded." Ulrich Baer Modern Painters
"[Joselit's] wonderfully spare text focuses on the first hints of the digital future as it was mapped by commercial network executives on the clunky hardware of the cathode-ray tube and the dumb black boxes that decoded the increasingly privatized information stream of cable TV." Caroline A. Jones Artforum
"An ambitious exploration of television at mid-century as it created its mythology of character, its rewriting of politics, and its illusions of feedback, *Feedback* grips the reader as well with challenging analyses of image creation, proliferation, and circulation today. Drawing on a wild history that includes psychedelia, blaxploitation, video art, guerilla TV, Nam June Paik, Hubert Humphrey, Lucille Ball, and Melvin Van Peebles, Joselit inspiringly entreats the reader to 'assess the image ecology... and respond to it' and 'use images to build publics' now."--Maud Lavin, Professor, Visual and Critical Studies and Art History, Theory, and Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
About the Author
In a world where politics is conducted through images, the tools of art history can be used to challenge the privatized antidemocratic sphere of American television.
11/12/2008
In a book that covers art, underground music, film, politics, and television, Joselit somehow manages to say nothing of interest or value about any one of these. Epic in its banality. Wow.
I would suggest that it makes a good primer for art and culture in the post-war period, but its over-zealous use of trendy neologisms is matched only scratcher, even for those who read widely.
Last but not least, one can't fail to poke fun at the closing "manifesto." A real treat for cynics.
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