“New Television”: The new public platform

by Hannah Wetz
At the Frieze Art Fair there was a talk about television. The proposal was this: How have artists responded New Television, considering its history of being shunned aside as arbitrary and low-end form of popular culture and entertainment? Because now, it cannot be denied that television – rather, the television show - is a platform for both aesthetic and socio-political expression.

Implicit in most accounts of what constitutes New Television is that it calls for an aesthetic response in the viewer. In doing so, the plot secondary to the imagery: High-end series such as the Wire or Mad Men, which were frequently discussed today, though fundamentally complex in their narrative, the viewer is rarely left in the dark in terms of who has betrayed whom, who is aware of it, who will be affected by it, but rather finds his or herself clinching at arbitrary details surrounding the lives of the protagonists, expecting them to amount to some great importance, as one would respond to a mostly-conceived, low-end soap opera. 

Soap operas are largely conceived of as low-end, uninteresting and unreliable accounts of the everyday. Yet millions of viewers tune in on a daily basis to follow the lives of these fictional characters, cleverly up-to-date in the “real world.” Hence it would seem that the soap opera is a very powerful tool in planting images of “real” matters, whether political, sexual, financial or otherwise. 
It is no wonder then that the Americanisation of soap operas into high-end series – the glamorisation and dramatisation of everyday life – is so successful in transposing its viewers’ responses to political and social matters that are confronted in the shows into responses to governmental action in reality. 

What are director’s intentions when they release a show such as The Wire? It seems to me that, while conceived as entertainment, the narrative has been constructed to provoke social unrest, to feed into the viewer’s mind a distrust of society. It seems to me that the real power in the director mirrors the power of artists in the early twentieth century and still today. With the aid of liberalism and the Internet, television has become the new platform for aesthetic storytellers to spread the word of injustice and inequality en masse. New Television is New Art. Directors are authors and artists, with a aesthetic style that caries a larger socio-political message. Television and the Internet is a means to present that message to almost anyone or any age, gender, religion, class, nationality, almost at any time, at the viewer’s convenience. Busy on Thursday at 10pm? No problem, watch on Friday, on almost any device, at almost any time. You’ll still see that imagery and you’ll still get the message.