The value of art on TV

Barry Chappell sells art on television. If you believe him, he sells fine, even museum quality art at bargain prices on Barry Chappell's fine art showcase. Fine art showcase is not a particularly well-known programme and in many ways it defies the most common models of understanding American television and TV programming. Indeed, it is sufficiently marginal that I sometimes wonder if it really counts as a television programme at all, even though it airs, live, on a recurrent basis. It also subsumes many of the familiar tropes of the medium, variously engaging liveness, self-reflexivity, education, entertainment, domesticity, public service, consumerism, repetition, direct address, intermediality, and convergence. These are deployed in the context of a constant discourse about art, as the programme participates in a much longer history of art on television.1 In the process, it raises fundamental questions about art, commerce, value, and consumer culture, and offers useful ways of thinking about current, transitional formations of television.

Fine art showcase is a version of Direct Response Television (DRTV), the industry label for programmes that market products directly to viewers. Infomercials and home shopping television services are the most familiar DRTV programmes. Infomercials are prerecorded programmes that air repeatedly to sell a specific product that viewers can order by mail, phone, or online. TV shopping networks (such as Home Shopping Club and QVC) sell a wide range of merchandise through live programming, accepting orders by telephone or through the internet.