Today on WRIR, listening to News and Notes (a public radio show that addresses issues in the African American community) I heard a piece of commentary on turn off tv week which is curently going on and about how this is especially important to the black community.
The thrust of the commentary was this:
1) It is especially important to the black community because black people watch more TV than whites.
2) You shouldn't watch so much goddamn television.
3) You shouldn't partly because TV is isolating
4) But really, it's because TV engages in fantasy and there is a whole real world out there waiting to be experienced.
While I'm pretty sure the first point was only put in there to ensure the commentary's inclusion on news and notes, and I don't have a problem with points two and three, I'd like to open door number 4, if I could.
TV's pernitious quality is not that it is fantasy. If so, than all art is pernitious, for it all engages to some extent with the imagination and the idea of the fantastical, be it space wizards with swords or Rabbit Run. The idea that there is some "reality" which is preferable (i.e. morally superior) to the world of art is a fairly unpleasant idea to posit. Surely, there is some balance to be found between seeing the ducks in central park and seeing a cubist painting of ducks in central park, for example?
To me, TV is potentially dangerous/unhealthy for two reasons. First, because it is almost always advertising posing as art and second because thanks to the seductive nature of video/film it can appear to be merely representing reality instead of interpreting it.
I've talked a bit about this first distinction and when I use these two words, I am using them the way David Foster Wallace does in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Aagain which is to say that Art wants to give you something and Advertising wants something from you. They can appear exactly the same (in fact, much advertising these days poses as art) but it's the end result that they want that's important. While aesthetically, the VW Bug commercial you just saw may beat out the experimental film you caught at The Quad, the truth of the matter is that the experimental film is trying to make you see the world in a different way and the VW Bug commercial is trying to get you to buy a car.
Or, say, the Friends episode where Phoebe hates The Pottery Barn only to discover by the end of the episode that they sell really great products. Or the Real World Road Rules Battle of the Seasons where everything they win has a brand name attached to it. These go even further-- they are simply advertisements posing as art. And this is dangerous, because there is something pretty sneaky (and rather disturbing) about tricking your audience in this way, by seducing them by saying relax, you're just watching fantasy and then hitting them with the sales pitch.
The second point has been belabored so much in this age of reality television that I feel little need to go into it, other than to say that the point that TV isn't as real as it looks can be applied to everything on said TV, from the size of Monica's apartment to the presense of WMDs in Iraq.
By debasing "fantasy" in general, we debase art. We need our fantasy. Just because it isn't "real" doesn't mean it doesn't have real power.
I really enjoyed this entry. I think you're spot on with the art vs. advertisement issue. In magazines we give space to advertisers editorially all the time. Whether or not that's bad, I'm not sure, because most of the time it seems inconsequential. We're not talking about front page stories, just a credit on a photoshoot that Maybelleine is cumming themselves over, but whatever. Anyway, everything is product placement these days, I guess.
Posted by: Cat | April 29, 2005 at 06:08 PM