Promotional Information

An ambitious exploration of television at midcentury as it created its mythology of character, its rewriting of politics, and its illusions of feedback, Feedback grips the reader as well with challenging analyses of image creation, proliferation, and circulation today. Drawing on a wild history that includes psychedelia, blaxploitation, video art, guerrilla TV, Nam June Paik, Hubert Humphrey, Lucille Ball, and Melvin Van Peebles, Joselit inspiringly entreats the reader to 'assess the image ecology...and respond to it' and 'use images to build publics' now. -- Maud Lavin, Professor, Visual and Critical Studies and Art History, Theory, and Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago In Feedback, David Joselit tackles the 800-pound gorilla of commercial television on both political and artistic grounds. Upsetting common dichotomies between artistic practice and commercial strategies, Joselit avoids either dismissing or embracing the commercial medium, offering a truly passionate critique that plunges into the intricacies of how the electronic image engages us, whether in our living room or a gallery floor. A bold work that seeks to generate argument and thought. -- Tom Gunning, Chair, Committee on Cinema and Media, University of Chicago, and author of The Cinema of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity Feedback is an incisive take on a period when art and life overlapped, and when intellectual activists regarded TV as an indispensable opponent -- the number one medium which we had to hijack, or else die from the banality it radiated. -- Andrew Ross, New York University

Promotional Information

"An ambitious exploration of television at midcentury as it created its mythology of character, its rewriting of politics, and its illusions of feedback, Feedback grips the reader as well with challenging analyses of image creation, proliferation, and circulation today. Drawing on a wild history that includes psychedelia, blaxploitation, video art, guerrilla TV, Nam June Paik, Hubert Humphrey, Lucille Ball, and Melvin Van Peebles, Joselit inspiringly entreats the reader to 'assess the image ecology... and respond to it' and 'use images to build publics' now." Maud Lavin, Professor, Visual and Critical Studies and Art History, Theory, and Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago "An ambitious exploration of television at mid-century as it created its mythology of character, its rewriting of politics, and its illusions of feedback, *Feedback* grips the reader as well with challenging analyses of image creation, proliferation, and circulation today. Drawing on a wild history that includes psychedelia, blaxploitation, video art, guerilla TV, Nam June Paik, Hubert Humphrey, Lucille Ball, and Melvin Van Peebles, Joselit inspiringly entreats the reader to 'assess the image ecology... and respond to it' and 'use images to build publics' now."--Maud Lavin, Professor, Visual and Critical Studies and Art History, Theory, and Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

About the Author

David Joselit is Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Infinite Regress- Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941, Feedback- Television against Democracy (both published by the MIT Press), American Art Since 1945, and After Art.

Reviews

An elegant, passionately argued, and crucially important rallying cry...There may be hope that this call to arms for the fields of art history and criticism will not go unheeded.—Ulrich Baer, Modern Painters

[Joselit's] wonderfully spare text focuses on the first hints of the digital future as it was mapped by commercial network executives on the clunky hardware of the cathode-ray tube and the dumb black boxes that decoded the increasingly privatized information stream of cable TV.—Caroline A. Jones, Artforum