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strengths of "The Gap" is that it teaches us one cannot talk about art independently of the space in which it can be understood as being either "on" or "off." In interviewing the security person about information concerning the art on display in the mall, we find that the security man is totally ignorant of specifics about the art. One would have to track down the higher-ups of the firm that manages the mall to gain access to information about the art. And the implication, quite clearly, is that even though the art is "on" at the mall, it is really "off limits" to the ordinary person, if not to the lower echelons. 

This issue pertains, as well, to the making of the video we are watching. When Davidovich interviews people in the shopping mall, it is quite noticeable that some of the interviewees act as if they were going to be broadcast that evening on the local news. Although they're "on" a video art piece, they themselves act as if they're "on" commercial television. Like the art on display at the mall, the video art piece, too, is out in the open or "on" but also curiously "off limits," given people's blindness to the presence of video art per se. The most striking example is that of a video store manager, who in being interviewed claims to know what video art is, but talks to Davidovich in a very authoritative and businesslike tone as if he were going to be "on" commercial TV. Especially here video art appears most "off" even when it is most "on." 

Davidovich does not forget to compare art work on display at the mall with art hanging on the walls of the Long Beach museum. A young couple in the museum is looking at abstract paintings, and Davidovich counts the number of seconds people are looking at the works. Here, again, it's a matter of attention being switched on and off. Once more, art is disclosed as sharing an essential feature with an electronic medium: that of something whose reception requires the act of switching between "on" and "off." If the work comes into being as art, it is certainly in terms of this switching that the work's ontology makes itself known to us. The museum, of course, arranges art so that we become very conscious of switching attention to and away from works. But it is the mall that interests Davidovich, because how art persists, dwells, or lasts in a space which is not designed to turn a wide spectrum of art on, or to turn us on to a wide spectrum of art, tells us quite a bit about the state of the arts in contemporary society.