At Arm's Length: (Taking a Good Hard Look at) Artists' Video

If the reception of television can be understood as offering far more than wasallowed by the ideas dominant from the 1960s on, so should the production of the medium.Twenty years ago, television in the United States comprised only network affiliates andlocal stations that wished to be network affiliaties, together with the worthy butdesperately underfunded public broadcasting stations. PBS operators are still underfundedtoday, and throughout the system the underlying commercial imperative is no lessimportant. Yet the television ecology is now far, far more varied, with numerous cable andsatellite services supplementing and challenging the no longer overwhelmingly dominantnetworks. As the critic Marita Sturken recognized in 1984:Network television as we have known it is slowly becomingobsolete. Vast, expensive, centralized, inflexible, it is thedinosaur of the 1980s and 90s gradually giving way to anelectronic entertainment industry that includes multiple channels,increased distribution via satellite, home recorders, and, forviewers, radically new elements of choice.Abroad, of course, since television started, there have been alternative modes offinancing, production and distribution quite different from those of the commercialnetworks. And in the last decade, despite the drive in many countries towards deregulationof state controls and increasing market pressures which are thought by many to stifledistinctive services, new television organizations like Channel 4, London and France's15