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2. Would you like to see more art/video art on televison, do you think that television (as opposed to private, gallery of museum showing) is a good way to present work like this? What would be the measure of success in this type of presentation?

Television, one of several means of presenting art/video art, places it within an entertainment/information context. This not only modifies the viewer's expectations, it also encourages a particular type of production (to fit a half-hour, rapid edit format). "Success": does this mean that video more cleverly imitates broadcast television (i.e. retains the format but alters the content)? Does that make video "POP" TV? Does this mean that more people watch? Does art on TV (or video art on TV) become "democratized" because it is articulated through a "mass" medium? I suspect the audience will not move beyond the initiated or the wish-to-be initiated.
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker
Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery

Television is a context for videotapes by artists. Though video art has a history of ten years in the most technologically explosive age since the industrial revolution, only a small number of videotapes by artists (though the number is growing) deal directly with the structures and problems which television as a medium presents. This is, perhaps in part, because little work has been shown on tv and the context has not been explore fully in practice.
Videotapes by artists not dealing directly with the structures and problems of television can be viewed as art on television rather than art in television. However, on some level, merely by being viewed on a 'tv set', the work must be television-referential. Essentially in theory, all video art viewed in galleries is viewed by an audience conscious of the mass media context of the work and all people who watch it on tv are conscious of it as 'art'. But theory is not always practice.
There are major implications for the showing of videotapes by artists on television. The most important work to show on tv is also the most difficult. A work that is specifically television-referential runs the gauntlet on television--will it be able to maintain its critical distance and referentiality when working right inside the medium it is addressing?
As I say, it will be difficult to ascertain these things until work is being shown with regularity on television. I'm not sure what 'success' would be in the case of showing video art on television-- perhaps a greater awareness of the implications of television as a prismatic information tool. 
Martha Fleming

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3. Do you think the proliferation of artwork on television will increasingly centralize our culture? Do you believe that television necessarily destroys local culture? If so, does it replace it with any kind of fair exchange?

I don't think that the proliferation of artwork on television will increasingly centralize our culture. I do think, however, that by accepting inclusion within the status quo as artist-tokens in the broadcast/cable-cast "real" television world artists play into in maintenance of the status quo. There is no doubt that this status quo use of television increasingly centralizes our culture and destroys local cultures and is oppressive to the generation of not only the work of artists but the work of any others concerned with the expansion of television's humanist potential.
David Ross

Proliferation of art work on television will not centralize our culture, it may centralize the means by which the art community communicates with itself. Television per se does not destroy local culture (if programming is controlled locally or ethnically). It does, however, force local culture into thirteen, half hour, rapid edit formats, regardless of who controls programming. Television does not replace local or even consensus culture, it reflects it, and inevitably, like all myth making systems (verbal or visual), it reinforces and modifies it.
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker

4. What do you consider to be the most important issue facing video and/or television in the next decade?

The most important issue facing the television medium in the next decade is increased production by individuals. Network television has regulated the public to be passive viewers. But as the medium develops, access will increase for the individual. However, will the individual be prepared for the medium? Ultimately, an individual's increased familiarity to produce programming for the medium in the 1980's will be equivalent to the last decade's popularization of the 35mm SLR camera. In fact, television and photographic cameras have much in common in relation to the marketing strategies employed and the continued development of self-operating systems. The one-step photographic camera (e.g., automatic SLR) is the forerunner of the one-step television camera. Can we imagine one-step television leading from the individual and into the homes of television viewers? I think the answer is yes! And if we were to poll hardware manufacturers, their response would be yes. The issue remains as to just who will be producing all this television and how will they be trained to do it. The fact is that the problem is already being resolved. The introduction of the home video cassette recorder and