Francesco Spampinato – Art vs. TV: A Brief History of Contemporary Artists’ Responses to Television

francesco-spampinato

Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN 978-1501370540, English, 368 pages, 2023, USA

The hierarchical role of television, the epitome of the one-to-many broadcast model, has been deeply shaken in time and space by the mobile, nomadic and responsive screens that we use today. The power of the user interface to decide when you watch, what you watch and at what speed, even in most streaming formats that end up being recorded, not to mention sampling and sharing practices, have destabilised the synchronised collective experience of the original medium that was entirely controlled by the broadcaster/author. However, the video form is still the most realistic medium, even when compared to the augmentations favoured by technophiles such as 3D animation and virtual reality (which is now being populated by video content too). Art vs. TV reconstructs a century of the complex yet extraordinary relationship between television and art. Spampinato succeeds in summarising in six chapters a curated history of some crucial genres explored by artists challenging the very grammar and popular formats of mass television. The framework of pioneering theorists, all mentioned in a timely manner, provides the connecting threads through a wealth of practices that are carefully illustrated. Beyond its own qualities, this book could also offer a great deal of exquisite content to the entire TikTok generation, to whom it is largely unknown.