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“Clear, compelling, frequently witty, and always engaging. In stunning and bold fashion, Lynn Spigel brings together television and fine arts and shows how their intersection fits logically into the history of twentieth-century culture. This is a work of major consequence.”
DANA POLAN, author of the British Film Institute’s Pulp Fiction

“An extraordinary examination of television in specific cultural contexts. Lynn Spigel has uncovered—or recovered—details that alter our histories of the medium, especially as related to other arts. For those who experienced it in the years she examines, the rush of memory and the re-placement of images, scenes, and personalities are sharp reminders of why TV became and remains so important.”
HORACE NEWCOMB, editor of Encyclopedia of Television

TV by Design
Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television

Lynn Spigel

TV by Design takes us back to the cold war years to witness the rise of two cultural superpowers: modern art and network television. Often mistakenly cast as polar opposites, television and fine art were intimately linked in this period as TV creators and producers drew inspiration from the latest trends in graphic design, avant-garde cinema, pop art, and modernist architecture. By broadcasting art’s cutting edge directly into America’s living rooms, TV gave modern art unprecedented national exposure. Lynn Spigel populates this fascinating history with the stories of the many artists—including Eero Saarinen, Duke Ellington, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, Andy Warhol, William Golden, and Richard Avedon—that worked in or were influenced by television and illustrates it with an array of photos, ads, and stills from the period. A lively correction to the medium’s reputation as a vast wasteland, TV by Design reveals the dynamic history of the ways television brought entertainment and art into people’s everyday lives.

Lynn Spigel is the Frances E. Willard Chair and Professor of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. She is the author of Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs and Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America.

 

Lynn Spigel is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Robert Hunt at (773) 702-0279 or rhunt@press.uchicago.edu

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