TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (review)

The least one can say of this new book by one of the most interesting scholars working in the field of television studies is that nothing will be the same anymore. Lynn Spigel’s study, wonderfully researched and written with a lot of humor, shatters our deeply rooted convictions that art and television belong to two separate spheres that have never truly communicated and whose past, present and future have never had much in common. What TV by Design demonstrates—and the evidence gathered in this book is so overwhelming that one cannot imagine that the research agenda will not be dramatically affected by Spigel’s archival research—is the harm done by a specific kind of cultural blindness: our irrepressible desire to read the past according to our present-day logic. It may be true, argues Spigel, that modern television has become a cultural wasteland (to quote the most popular metaphor used in this respect) and that all the interesting evolutions and discoveries that have been made possible by the new medium’s technology have to be found in video; yet this does not mean that the gap between television, as an epitome of mass culture and cultural industry, and art, as the embodiment of creativity, ideological resistance, personal freedom and so on, has always been there––nor, and even more importantly, that our hegemonic and perhaps very stereotyped definitions of what art and television may represent are able to provide the right insights into the very exciting and often astonishing interaction between what we consider to be the best (art) and the worst (television) of our world.

The specific subject that Lynn Spigel tackles in this book is the so-called network era, that is, the first decades of national broadcasting, mainly the 1950s and 1960s, dominated by the competition of the three major networks, ABC, NBC and CBS. In these years before the emergence of cable television on the one hand and public broadcasting (PBS) on the other hand, commercial television was not the “anti-culture” it has become today, representing everything that goes wrong in culture and society, but a new frontier, a promise, a blank spot on the map, a space open to all possible challenges and experiments. It should therefore not come as a surprise––although it actually does very much, given our cultural amnesia and, probably, our intellectually lazy but comfortable prejudices against all things televised––that this exceptional mediascape has seen the rise and fall of many ideas on what television might or ought to be, and one of the crucial but completely forgotten dimensions of the mutual shaping of a new technology (television) and its cultural environment (first the Cold War, then the counterculture) is the fact that all networks have attempted to give a key role to art, in the double sense of art “on television” and of television “as art.”

Thanks to the study of some barely known archives, Lynn Spigel succeeds in disclosing a part of America’s cultural heritage and history that had been erased from all current memories. One of the great lessons she helps us to draw is that the bias against television as being both anti-artistic and anti-innovative is simply wrong. From the very early years on, television was eager to establish a dialogue with art. Even more importantly, it has nourished the belief that it would be capable of producing a totally new form of art, more popular and more democratic as well as more local, more national, in a word more American. Commercialism and commitment to art were not seen as incompatible values. Rather, it was commercialism itself and the need to cater to a new public having new tastes very different from the European models and standards that was seen as a springboard to the invention of a genuinely American culture. The...