There’s no escaping TV, not even at the museum

Because I Said So column for The Commercial Appeal

Jan. 20, 2011

“Turn off the TV, kids. We’re going to get some culture whether you like it or not,” I barked last Saturday.

They begrudgingly did so, and on the first temperate day in weeks, with the sun in a bright blue sky and the last remnants of snowmen melting just off the ninth tee of the Overton Park golf course, we visited the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

We took this field trip because the children need the balance of technology and pixels with paint and bronze. And because it was free. In honor of the inauguration of Gov. Bill Haslam, many museums in the state offered free admission last Saturday.

So we turned off our computers, set aside the Wii remotes and even said goodbye to the television for an afternoon. What we found, when we walked through the museum’s glass front doors, right there in the rotunda, was a sort of monument to my children.

“Vide-O-belisk,” the 30-foot-high commission by late South Korean artist Nam June Paik, took their collective breath away. The sculpture is a tower of 25 or so vintage television sets, all working and all flashing random images and colors in a loop. I’m sure the old sets and the images themselves represent something, but the only question my kids had was, “Where is the remote?”

And where were the remotes? I imagined a second sculpture with 25 remotes, batteries dead or missing on all. Or that number of sofas scattered around the museum, each with a remote underneath or lost in the depths of cushions … (read more)