The Museum as TV Producer: Televisual Form in Curating, Commissioning, and Public Programming

Abstract

This chapter examines a selection of TV‐themed exhibitions and artworks realized since the 1970s, focusing on curatorial, commissioning, and programming initiatives at institutions such as the Long Beach Museum of Art (LBMA), Long Beach, California; Kunstverein München, Germany; Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Since the 1970s, television has attracted the attention of art institutions that seek to engage with changing practices of media production and consumption, and to reinvent the art museum in the guise of TV producer. If cable television initially served as an important focus for these curatorial and commissioning initiatives, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, it was gradually supplanted by newer technologies, with several art institutions embracing webcasts and other modes of “Internet TV” by the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even though TV has largely been displaced by social media as an emblem of popular culture, it continues to function as an important reference point for artists, curators, and art intuitions seeking to negotiate and articulate new relationships with audiences and new conceptions of publicness.