Just a few more thoughts about reality tv and performance art, I don’t have too much time today, so these are some comments, not a well thought out essay, of course not, it’s a blog! In her article, “Trashy or Transgressive? Reality TV and the Politics of Social Control” Laura Grindstaff comments
Ironically, the very arguments used by the Frankfurt School theorists to denigrate film in relation to painting and other forms of “high art” were replicated by certain film scholars in their attempts to resist the incorporation of television studies into the academy during the late 1970s. Thus, while Trash TV is currently described as a “virus” infecting legitimate network programming, not so long ago television itself was considered the disease. In his essay “Candid Cameras,” Andrew Ross notes with some amusement that television has been characterized by various presidential committees over the years as a “vast wasteland,” an “electronic Appalachia,” and a “toaster with pictures.” Intellectuals were even less charitable, as television became the latest unredeemable “bad object” in the continuing debate about mass culture. Not only was it particularly debased (“TV stinks to heaven … if you have to study it, hold your nose and take a bath later on”) but it threatened the very stability of society (“next to the H-Bomb, no force on earth is as dangerous as television”). The danger lay precisely in TV’s ability to simulate reality, rather than merely represent it, and the inability of the viewer to know the difference — the “blur effect” that most scandalized Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectics of Enlightenment and continues to scandalize media critics today. As Ross observes, with the rise of live television and the challenges it posed to print media, the capacity to falsely conflate TV with “the real thing” had supposedly increased a thousandfold, and with it, the increased capacity for “false consciousness” already attributed by intellectuals to the mass TV audience. Continue reading
