Feedback

"American television embodies a paradox: it is a privately owned and operated public communications network that most citizens are unable to participate in except as passive spectators. Television creates an image of community while preventing the formation of actual social ties because behind its simulated exchange of opinions lies a highly centralized corporate structure that is profoundly antidemocratic. In Feedback, David Joselit describes the privatized public sphere of television and recounts the tactics developed by artists and media activists in the 1960s and 1970s to break open its closed circuit." "In Feedback, Joselit analyzes midcentury image-events using the procedures and categories of art history. The trope of figure/ground reversal, for instance, is used to assess acts of representation in a variety of media - including the medium of politics. In a televisual world, Joselit argues, where democracy is conducted though images, art history has the capacity to become a political science."--Jacket.