January CommQuote

 

 

This month's quote comes from art critic Karen Rosenberg reviewing Nam June Paik: Global Visionary, a new show currently running at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

 

Paik, from our current vantage point, looks like a master prognosticator. He coined the term “electronic superhighway.” He was one of the first artists — possibly the first, period — to use a portable video recorder. And he foresaw the expansion of television into a dizzying array of niche channels, even if he didn’t quite guess that it would spring out of the box and sever its ties to the cathode-ray tube.  His 1973 video “Global Groove” opens with the pronouncement, “This is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.”

                --Karen Rosenberg, New York Times, January 11, 2012

 

The show runs from December 13, 2012 through August 11, 2013 which should give you plenty of time to get it on your calendar. Too bad it's not coinciding with the NCA Conference in November of 2013 though the Museum does have a permanent collection of his work, The Nam Paik Archive.