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

by Lynn Spigel
University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2009
402 pp., illus., 52 b/w.  
Trade, $27.50
ISBN: 978-0226769684.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens


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 humour, shatters our deeply rooted convictions that art and television belong to two separate spheres, which 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 back is the so-called network era, i.e. the first decades of national broadcasting, mainly the 50s and the 60s, 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, where it represents everything that goes wrong in culture and society, but a new frontier, a promise, a blank sport 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 hardly known archives, Lynn Spigel succeeds in disclosing a part of America's cultural heritage and history that had been erased of 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 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 the needs of a new public having new tastes that were very different from the European models and standards that was seen as a springboard to the invention of a genuinely American culture. The one-minute commercials were the most astounding of this marriage of art and business, but Spigel has many other examples that show help to get rid of the idea that television was all about money and advertisement space. The suspicion and even critique of high culture on television was not a symptom of American rudeness, but the flip side of a no less systematic attempt to bring up new and more original forms of art and culture. Similar remarks apply to the falsely held belief that television is by definition unable to breed new forms of art or new forms of living. Here again, Spigel offers a detailed survey of the profound complicity between television and alternative modes of working and thinking throughout the network era. What her examples make clear -from the influence of auteur and underground cinema on the visual language of the commercials to Andy Warhol's queer experiments with native formats such as the soap opera or the televised interview or from the endeavour to invent new form of art documentaries to the transformation of a TV brand in a global graphic design - is that the boundaries between mainstream and guerrilla were much less clear-cut than what we think of it today. Our familiarity with niche markets and our global awareness of a progressive decline of what remains of the three networks, tend to erase the extraordinary exchanges that took place in these years.

A second great lesson is the reconsidering of one of the key issues in postmodern theory: the debate on high and low. Spigel provides the reader with great evidence that the so-called blending of the brows is partially a myth - and that it has certainly been misunderstood. She insists very much on the fact that the high and low discussion is not something that can be reduced to artistic and ideological discussions on the value of art (and on value in general), but that it is crucial to take into account the material circumstances that permitted the encounter of the taste levels. The rise of television, in that regard, is not simply a consequence of a new relationship between high and low, but a machine that enables their problematic and utterly complex encounter.

If this book is so great an achievement -and so great a pleasure to read! - it is not only due to the incredible wealth of historical sources that are disclosed in this book, but also to the author's decision to approach television from a cultural point of view. Inspired by British cultural studies, mainly Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, she achieves a reframing of television as 'cultural practice' (Williams) and as 'entertainment' (which Hall distinguishes from art but also from technology) that was terribly needed. It is now possible to make a new start for all those interested in the art versus non-art discussion.