On Television
You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal.
Howard Beale, Network, 1977
João Líbano Monteiro
Brooke Gladstone
Political Advertisement 1952-2024
For 40 years, Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese have been compiling a video history of presidential campaign spots that follows the evolution of broadcast political advertising from its beginnings in 1952 to the present. When the artists started this project in 1984, finding broadcast political ads required exhaustive research in archives and often involved personal contact with the candidate’s campaigns, a bit more complicated than today’s internet click and download.