de Montgolfier, Clémence

Showing contemporary art on television in France. Mediation devices (1960–2013) - 2020.


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Whereas in the 1960s, televised programs about the arts were a significant part of the young French audiovisual landscape, they have progressively disappeared from screens and are nowadays only visible “at night and in the summer.” Those television programs that show contemporary art in the field of visual arts constitute a double mediation between artworks and viewers: both the exhibition and its audiovisual mediation. What, then, are the features of these devices for showing artworks? We will analyze the evolution of these programs since 1960 and show that they place their object, contemporary artworks, in a double bind by recontextualizing them: promising their transparent mediation on the one hand, and promising a more intense density of their mediation—thus more opaque—on the other hand.