Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Busting the Tube response questions


Throughout her essay, Kate Horsfield discusses the impacts that early Television had on society, and how it was used to manipulate the outlook of society. She goes on to say that “ Video immediately captured the attention of artists who saw its potential as a creative tool and of social activists who it as a weapon and a witness to be used to create new types of representation that opposed the ubiquitous commercialism of the television industry.” Do you feel that film has lost most of the power that it possessed when it was first introduced, or has it become a stronger tool used by society?

In the Passage, Horsfield claims, “ These performances were based on conceptual art that emphasized process and idea over form to analyze texts, language, and the image… Other artists used performance to investigate social and power relations between individuals or between individuals, audiences, and larger social systems.” With YouTube making it easily accessible for anyone to upload a video of just about anything, do you feel it has contributed to a degradation of the true art form behind making powerfully conceptualized videos?

1 comment:

  1. I would argue that film has both gained more attention from society and less. More in the sense that it is generally 'more' accepted as a social custom than when it was first introduced. Less because we have seen the customs of film and its stereotypes perhaps too often to take it seriously as before. You know, buddy cop flick #34343. Tools for expression, like any tool, dull after extensive use.

    As for YouTube degrading value in that way, I would say it has 'increased' the ability for anyone to be an artist in some form. And that idea is a blissful one, I think. Someone without the tools to do art before may have found their interface. Though with 'anyone' making videos/art, the average quality overall tends to lessen. I believe society has a way of 'filtering' out bad art versus good art. We know quality prevails when the criticism of it is slim to none.

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