There are countless reasons to loathe television. It’s become fashionable to disavow it completely and TV networks themselves tacitly admit to its association with mental atrophy through their public service announcements. Despite a growing acknowledgement of its detrimental effects (or perhaps, on account of them), the world of academia has dissected television and its implications.

David Joselit’s lecture “Feedback: Art, Television, Politics” further dissects the subject, exploring television from its beginning in the 1950s and how it became important in the spheres of art and politics.

“Why should I, an art historian, speak to you [about] TV? We are supposed to disdain TV,” Joselit said in the beginning of the lecture.

Joselit’s career as an art historian started during his undergraduate years at Harvard. After graduating in 1981, Joselit worked as curator at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Most recently, Joselit has published writings on modern and contemporary art and teaches art history at Yale.

Joselit used slide images throughout his presentation to illustrate TV’s growth. In a still from a 1968 commercial, Lucky Strikes cigarettes take part in a barn dance. In another image, Old Gold cigarettes also boogie down for viewers, literally becoming “dancing butts”. The anthropomorphized products were just two examples of the animation of inanimate objects that is standard in TV even today. Television, in Joselit’s view, transformed from an information network into a variegated network of interests that appealed to the needs and wants of different generations.

Explaining Jack Gould’s book “All About Radio and Television,” published in 1968, Joselit described a time in which television was more associated with up and coming technology than with laziness. Gould, a TV critic, wrote for children whose lives weren’t yet consumed by several hours of TV-viewing a day; in the book, he explains what television is, even outlines directions for making one. And yet a slide image of the book’s cover art suggested the near future: A scene of two children in an empty void. They are in front of a television, surrounded by darkness and electromagnetic waves – the image is both domestic and a highly unsettling depiction of television’s omnipresence.

One reason for television’s transformation into an inescapable cultural technology is that it merged the usefulness of the network and commodity in several ways. Network and commodity each serve as a function of the other, according to Joselit. Although television was a technology before it was a product, its cultural importance is as a medium. In this way, Joselit explained, early television educated a generation of people on their class status. Turning away from knowledge and cues passed on from family, friends, and peers, the viewers of this generation learned their place in society through the small screen in their living rooms.

Nam June Paik distorted the commercial world of television through his work literally; his 1963 show “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television” included prepared television whose scattered, manipulated images were a first for the growing field of video and temporal art. As an example of television as art, Joselit placed Paik’s work in the context of the role of television and its potential for use outside of witnessing events.

“Television is a mode of witnessing that is uneventful,” Joselit said.

This witnessing is repetitive and familiar, explaining the comfort in falling asleep in front of the TV or waking up to certain news program in the morning. Television is a form of company, “man’s best friend” for the couch potato generation. Nevertheless, Joselit’s message embraces it [as a tool], both commercially and artistically, for better or worse.

“To ignore TV,” Joselit said, “is to ignore how power operates in our culture.”