The case on Chris Burden also caught my eye in this week’s lecture. After doing more research on Burden, I found that his self-assigned mission was “to break the omnipotent strange hold of the airwaves that broadcast television held.” He took on this daring project of buying and artistically repurposing commercial airtime. This stuck out to me because I don’t know if something like that could happen today in modern times. Instead, people today are obsessed with using their commercial airtime to sell their products and market their brand to the viewers. I find it hard to believe that today someone would spend their money to take an artistic stance, rather than to use it as a platform to make more money. In an interview with an elderly Burden, he discusses how television time could be bought like any other product, and then it was yours. Acts such as these showed that Burden was clearly an artist willing to take art beyond the limits. His hijack of TV also reminded me of a movie trailer I recently saw called Money Monster, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Basically, Clooney plays a TV host whose show is taken hostage by a viewer while live on air. While of course this is a film subject to dramatization and exaggeration, I feel there is some similarity and perhaps influence from Burden in terms of taking over what people see on live TV to get your point across and to get people to listen.
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