Video Killed the Photography Star! (Maybe) in Two Talks

by Paula Newton February 23, 2015

Keasler_SmithTomorrow night (February 24 at 7pm), photography and video will battle it out in a talk at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Curator Andrea Karnes will hold a conversation with Misty Keasler and Allison V. Smith, two artists featured in the current exhibition Framing Desire: Photography and Video. Okay, the argument is probably photography/video versus every other art medium, as is exemplified by the Modern’s exhibition description:

Like [Susan] Sontag’s assessment of photography [in her 1973 essay “In Plato’s Cave”], video also has the ability to seamlessly flow between reality and fantasy—and each medium does so to a marked degree over painting, drawing, or sculpture, especially because they often depict objects, places, and people from the real world. Yet even with their believability over other mediums, by the aim of the camera, click of the shutter, or roll of the film, artists choreograph and construct their shots, bringing their subjectivity to the image.

If you’re more north of Tuesday evening’s DFW talk, check out the program at the Mary Moody Northern Art Gallery (West Texas A&M). In conjunction with the show Multi-Channel: Currents in Contemporary Video Art, Chip Lord, video art pioneer and former member of Ant Farm (creators of the Cadillac Ranch), will give a lecture at the Branding Iron Theater.

For those too young to get the reference of the headline, here’s an extra treat: the first ever music video shown on MTV in the U.S., at 12:01am on August 1, 1981. Watch and believe—you can’t make this stuff up!

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