Technology and Culture

Conventional wisdom has it that much of the form and content of early television can be traced back to theater, vaudeville, movies, and radio. Lynn Spigel begs to differ. In TV by Design, she argues that the form and content of TV between the late 1940s and early 1970s were also shaped by contemporaneous developments in modern art, broadly defined. Drawing on an impressive array of primary and secondary materials, Spigel examines the convergences between television and art after World War II. Noting that "there is no sustained historical study of broadcast television's relationship to the broader context of postwar visual arts" (p. 6), Spigel seeks to shine a light on a symbiosis most television and art historians have overlooked. Her book is a bold attempt to redraw the history of TV's golden age.

TV by Design consists of seven chapters framed by an introduction and an epilogue. Chapter one deals with the ideas attached to modern art vis-à-vis American ideology in the postwar period. Television, Spigel argues, brought modern art—particularly painting—into American living rooms, and in so doing helped make it safe for consumption. Though largely forgotten about today, television during the period bore witness to a range of developments in modern art. Contemporary readers may be surprised to learn, for instance, that "a wide variety of television shows—from cultural-affairs programs to melodramas to variety shows to sitcoms to quiz shows—showcased modern art on a regular basis" (p. 21).

The next two chapters detail CBS's efforts to brand itself using modern design. Spigel contends that "Modern design was a crucial part of the television image and the cultural experience of watching TV" (p. 71). Chapter three looks at how the company's modernist sensibilities were translated into the 1953 building CBS Television City in Los Angeles.

Chapter four moves back to New York to address the Museum of Modern Art's forays into television. Starting as early as 1939,MoMA attempted [End Page 527] to use TV to reach a broader public, especially housewives. Spigel does a nice job here of exploring the tensions inherent in using an increasingly commercial medium to educate people about art.

The fifth chapter deals with the audiovisual experiments of Ernie Kovacs. Because these took place on mainstream commercial TV, they suggest to Spigel "that artistic experimentation and commercial imperatives were actually joined together and could in fact be mutually lucrative" (p. 205). Indeed, some of Kovacs's ideas about sound quickly found their way into commercials. Chapter six turns to commercials more fully, exploring how advertisers adopted techniques from European art cinema in order to appeal to a generation of viewers who fancied themselves too sophisticated to be manipulated by traditional advertising.

The book ends with a chapter on Andy Warhol, whom Spigel calls "the only artist of the period who seriously explored the potential uses of ordinary commercial TV" (pp. 251-52). Looking at the entire range of his television work, Spigel argues that Warhol used TV to publicize subjects mainstream TV kept from being seen—particularly homosexuals—rendering them more mundane to average viewers in the process.

As even this brief overview suggests, Spigel deals with a lot of material, and she is not always entirely successful at weaving it all together. At times, the book feels like a scattershot collection of case studies. Not all of the chapters will be of equal interest to everyone. Nevertheless, Spigel's project has value insomuch as each chapter seeks to shed light on some of the intersections between the world of television and the world of art, thus challenging the impression that the two were ever separate. Accordingly, the book makes an important contribution to media studies, art history, and American studies, among other fields. Historians of technology looking for a model of how to set technologies within their larger cultural contexts would also be well served by checking it out. As Spigel...