TV Series Ended in 2009 (and again in 2010) but Keeps Expanding Socially
The world’s longest TV series on contemporary art, “Art21,” ended on public television in October 2009 with these last words by American sculptor Allan McCollum: “It would be nice if everyone in the world agreed on a symbolic system. It hasn’t happened yet. It might, one day.”
Then again, the series had not really ended. It emerged on television once again in October 2010 with a single “special episode” on the South African artist William Kentridge. His last words were: “That’s why art, rather than analysis.”
The real last word on “Art21—Art in the Twenty-First Century” has not been uttered quite yet. Having produced 84 episodes over five biennial seasons (2001 to 2009), Art21 not only holds a record, but also a cache of boxed DVDs that keep the program before the eyes of the public. Just recently, moreover, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), its home sponsor, has posted all the half-hour episodes for free viewing (you used to have to buy the DVDs).
Art21, Inc. also seems to be growing larger, moving beyond the television screen. Its expansion—into community engagement, public school activity, blogs, and everything from Facebook to Flickr and YouTube—tells us a lot about how the art world communication system is developing today. Most of it is digital, a realm with no limit—no last word—in sight.
Back in 2007, Art21 was somewhat ahead of the curve by inaugurating its blog along with season no. 4 of its programming. Today the Art21 blogosphere is a veritable city: weekly video clips, a social network forum, and regular feature blogs on art and controversy, food, the studio, Los Angeles, London, teaching contemporary art, conserving art, making documentaries, and a news round-up. A staff of nine writers and fifty guest bloggers are churning it out, generating 30,000 visitors to the PBS Art21 site a month. This of course is the new model in journalism, from The Huffington Post to the Web “comment” sections now run by every print newspaper and magazine.
A state of information overload may not have arrived yet. And nobody quite knows when to stop, since unlike print information, Web information is only limited by the electrons in the fiber optic cables and Internet servers.
Hence, the limit is usually reached when an organization such as Art21 runs out of money, semi-volunteer staff, or a participating public. Based on foundation grants and commercial sales, Art21 launched itself in 1997 “with the mission to increase knowledge of contemporary art, ignite discussion, and inspire creative thinking by using diverse media to present contemporary artists at work and in their own words.”
It won awards from the start, and the 84 episode videos have became a mainstay for class instruction by high school and college art teachers, mainly because students can see and hear real artist, many of them celebrities. The Art21 folks have also become a common feature at the annual meetings of the National Art Education Association, which gathers the nation’s art teachers.
When the art-blog frenzy becomes too much, and when we’ve seen all the Art21 videos, we still have a haven to retreat too. That is the considerable volume of art documentaries produced for English-speaking television since the 1960s (all of which are on DVDs somewhere, and most of which still cost money to obtain). It began in 1969 with British traditionalist Kenneth Clark’s 13-part BBC series “Civilisation: A Personal View,” which prompted a leftwing reaction in John Berger’s 1972 series, “Ways of Seeing.” That four-part BBC event explained art with Marxist and feminist perspectives.
Then in 1980 came art critic Robert Hughes’ eight-part series on modern art, “The Shock of the New,” done by the BBC and Time-Life films. A fallow period followed when suddenly “Sister Wendy” Beckett’s BBC series of art-appreciation tours stole the show (1992 to 2001), perhaps rivaled only by two recent BBC productions, the five-part "How Art Made the World" with Cambridge scholar Nigel Spivey and Simon Schama’s eight-part “The Power of Art,” both in 2006.
To be fair, all along, private filmmakers have be making serviceable series on great artists. Outfits such as The Learning Company produce full visual lectures on art history. The most-watched television art program of all time, Bob Ross’s hokey “The Joy of Painting,” aired from 1983-1994 on PBS. In Britain, art historian Tim Marlow has kept turning out episodes on current art events (and history), and Australian painter and television personality Rolf Harris produced a British TV series, now on video.
A pattern is now obvious: England and the BBC are way ahead in art television. State television alone, it seems, can guarantee funding for art programs. This also may explain why Art21 just keeps on going. It is part of the PBS infrastructure. This is all to the good, no doubt, and suggests a future (though hardly to Art22).
In the “last” Art21 episode with Kentridge, which featured his art and his latest opera, based on Nikolai Gogol’s satirical short story, “The Nose,” the artist explains that he could have followed the path of his parents, both rationalist lawyers. Instead, he decided that the irrational—even the absurd—was just as valid a way to deal with life: “The absurd … is an active and productive way of understanding the world.”
Art21, however, has nothing absurd about it, since it is a paragon of rational planning, programming, and execution.
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