Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha is a perfect artwork. Though some of the series are better than others, I’m not able to rank them. Maybe we need to see them all side by side, a thousand TV Buddhas, to figure it out. Enlightenment is just around the corner, I can feel it.
Anyway, Aste Boetto, the Genoese auction house, says this TV Buddha is from 1985. When the presumed sellers, the Fondazione Pier Luigi e Natalina Remotti, showed it in 2014, they said it had no date.
That show, The Future Is Now, also included Paik’s TV Frogs, 1979-95, which feels like it should be perfect, but is not. There are two frogs? And they watch a videotape of frog-related programming? Who rewinds the tape? TV Buddha feels like an incisive and alluring comment on our world springing the contemplative trap of the self on us all, but TV Frogs just feels like an ad for our 500-channel cable future. Is there perhaps a Buddhist frog-in-a-well parable involved, where the images on the TV don’t begin to account for the vast world beyond the frame? Because just googling for Buddha frog is kind of ridiculous.
Anyway, the Fondazione Remottis bought TV Frogs from the Emily Harvey Foundation, and then they sold it in 2016. Not sure how any of that works, karmically.