Alex Greenberger

“I think the best technology, information, has to do with education—our thinking,” artist Nam June Paik wrote in his famed 1976 essay “Why is Television Dumb?” Anyone who knows Paik and his strange, perplexing, and positively revolutionary art knows that the essay’s title is ironic: his early adoption of video and transformation of the television sets into sculptures made anyone who saw it think and prefigured our relationship with digital technologies today. Without his pioneering use of TV, in all its manifold forms, it is possible that art today might be very different—and, by extension, we all might think in vastly different ways.