Chapter 18 – Television

Television

Introduction

The first television station in America started broadcasting in 1928 and remained commercial free until July 1941 with an ad for a Bulova watch that lasted 10 seconds. We might think that was “the good old days” when we compare it to what we find on television today with non-stop soap operas, talk shows, children’s shows,  news shows, game shows, shopping channels, movies, and of course 15 minutes of advertising every hour? Need I say more?

We review Pop Art in Art and Simple Reality, Volume 1, Chapter 11. But we mention it here in relation to this chapter on Television with this quote: “It was done to the people. It grew by analogy to what it admired, advertising and the media through which advertisements were replicated. And it grew dandyistically, casting itself in the role of the detached, amused, lenient, but inflexibly ironic spectator at the vast theatre of desire and illusion which the mass media of the twentieth century had erected. By far the most powerful of these was television.”[i]  

 

Introduction

[i]     Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, page 344.   

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Television Table of Contents

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Find a more in-depth discussion in printed books by Roy Charles Henry.

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