ABSTRACT
Today, an art gallery or art museum without video art is unthinkable. At documenta, the Venice Biennale and countless other global art fairs, video art has become one of the primary forms of contemporary art. Video art arose from experiments that started as early as the 1960s to become the most prominent fine-art medium to be canonized in the art world during the latter half of the twentieth century. Given its religious origins in relation to the sanctification of saints, canonization is generally equated with the institutional embrace of individuals as dogmatic icons. In the art world, works of art, movements, even mediums are similarly canonized through the consolidation of networks of institutional recognition and support. The emergence and eventual canonization of video art happened in two main stages. The first occurred during the 1960s and early 1970s, when visual artists began using television as a medium. This was the time when the name “video art” was coined, marking a major step toward canonization. But it took until the 2001 Venice Biennale for video art’s apotheosis to be complete. Its ubiquity there prompted a number of critics to declare that the very idea of a contemporary art gallery had been transformed by video art from a white cube into a black box.
