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What The Sophist finds most outrageous, however, is that most people are likely to privilege semblances over icons, and that semblances appear to be more "on" (convincing, memorable, powerful, lasting, present, etc.) than icons. How can a debased representation appear more satisfactory than a proper representation unless the alternative space created by the debased representation has completely perverted our ability to know the truth? In question are those artists who would experiment with ontological correspondences by manipulating space. To do this is wrong, according to Plato's argument, because it puts us into a supposedly false relationship with things. Such work cannot be "on" in the sense of having a so-called true definition, but is seen as profoundly "off" even though it pretends not to be. 

The sacrifice or lack of "on-ness" has been a characteristic of art which resists spatial and temporal norms and forms. From today's vantage point we could easily identify television with Plato's notion of the phantastic, of a lowly defined and distorted representation of reality at a distance. All the arguments which can be brought against phantasma in relation to icons could be leveled against television, and without doubt video art implicitly comes into conflict with the icon/phantasma relationship whenever it is shown in museums or galleries where other media are on display.

Commercial television attempts to become a very "on" medium in the same way that Plato's semblances did: by playing to mass audiences on a colossal scale, and by bringing the faraway nearer to the viewer. But some, who hold Platonic assumptions, might agree that this concern with being an "on" medium is what deprives commercial television of the capacity to be artistic in anything but the most superficial sense. That is, the "on-ness" of broadcast television is precisely what we should hold most suspect. Therefore, some video artists have been willing to sacrifice such "on-ness" in order to let the medium bring us into an alternative space which does not presuppose naive notions of presence, realism, fidelity, or representation as life. In other words, some artists have broached an anti-metaphysical conception of video. 

Certainly, "The Live! Show" itself moves us in this direction. In fact, this program, while disclosing the subjectivity of a video artists in a live television broadcast series, has been ironically very much concerned with what one might