Defend television as a form of art in no more than 300 words.

for Westminster University.

As I see it, any kind of media can be considered an art form as long as it conveys some sort of individual or collective vision through the use of its characteristic devices, and it is according to this definition that I defend that television is an art form as well. It has been most effectively used by highly recognised artists such as Andy Warhol in his ‘Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes’ or ‘Andy Warhol’s TV’, and David LaChapelle in his music videos.
The most problematic issue in this discussion is that television is a medium that always talks about other media, so it is difficult to recognise its particularities as it works at such subliminal levels that we are immediately immersed in whatever the subject is and unable to pay attention to the actual form in which it is presented. However, in a way this is exactly why television is such an accomplished art form, since it is able to capture our undivided attention and deliver its messages intelligibly and in a rather authoritarian fashion.
In addition, if we are more interested in style than content, it is also a pleasure to study the conventions of formal television, its stylistic devices and how and when it decides to subvert them, specially how these change according to the variety of actual formats in which television manifests itself.
This is a very attractive medium to those who want to experiment with the relationships and ways of manipulation between author and viewers and permits a flexibility and explicitness that the last generations of artists are very keen on carrying in their works.