Doin' some reading

The following is from Margot Lovejoy's Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (1989)

"Refusal [to outright embrace of "the new" as a positive act of renewal] takes several forms. For some artists, it takes the form of a conservative, obstinate refusal of modernity involving loyalty to the traditional practice of art and the patient pleasures of hand gesture and experiment through slow manipulation using time-honored practices. For others, it takes the form of a refusal of the present by turning inward to a private metaphorical world apart from time itself. For yet others, the refusal may be aggressive or derisive -- a political refusal or denunciation of technological civilization in which man is seen as a powerless endangered species in a system where technology is owned and manipulated by those in power to control and direct the culture and society as a whole.

....

If artists can liberate tefchnology from those who own and manipulate its use for goals of power or profit, technology can be used constructively as an enlightening influence to gain new insight, to seek new meaning, to open higher levels of communication and perception. For example, commercial television commonly portrays as the truth sensationalist news stories and documentaries to a mass audience which is increasingly passive and addicted to it as their major form of access to the outside world. The Wizard of Oz is the ultimate metaphor for the manipulation of consciousness by television. Finally unmasked as a fragile mortal playing God behind a screen of lights and a thunder of noise, the Wizard of Oz characterizes the power of the media to confuse truth and fiction. We often mistake highly edited presentations of an event as factual truth. "Our absorption and belief in media's second-hand information can distract us from home truths that we sorely need to deal with, or -- to use the metaphor of Oz once again -- [it distracts us] from getting back to the reality of Kansas." (Barry Blinderman, "Ed Paschke," p. 131.) As artist Ed Paschke has remarked: "I don't really think we realize how ingrained in us that way of seeing that format really is. There's life and there's T.V.""