Nam June Paik

We will never know which cave dweller was the first to discover that mineral pastes and charcoal could be smeared on a rock wall to make a painting. But we do know who first recognized that television could be made into art. And we don't mean the art of making television programs. We mean art created from TV sets, TV tubes, TV cabinets and TV signals. The founding father of video art, which by now ranks as one of the museum world's serious growth sectors, was the Korean-born provocateur Nam June Paik.

In the early 1960s, while studying...

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