Modern Artifacts 8: The Art of Broadcasting

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This latest installment of a regular series copresented with the Museum of Modern Art Archives concerns MoMA’s relationship to television, which the museum’s archivist, Michelle Elliigott, describes in her introduction as “riddled with ambiguity, multiple agendas, and several false starts.” Reproduced here are fascinating documents related to a 1955 episode of Home, a popular NBC daytime show, which featured MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., explaining the meaning of modern art.

Michelle Elligott is Chief of Archives, Library, and Research Collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at New York University. Her award-winning publications include Modern Artifacts (2020), René d’Harnoncourt and the Art of Installation (2018), and Art in Our Time: A Chronicle of the Museum of Modern Art (2004). Elligott was a Center for Curatorial Leadership International Fellow in 2016 and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, in 2005. She holds a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. from Hunter College, CUNY, both in Art History.