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Title: Superficial
Review: N. Harrison pretty much nails it - this is just a coffee table book. Blowups of individual video stills are nice looking, but don't convey much of anything about the works. The blurbs are largely superficial. Rush's earlier book "New Media in Contemporary Art" is a much better survey of the terrain. Harrison's point about Harun Farocki also illustrates a wider point - the conceptual rubric of "video art" is incoherent and unnecessary. It was a stop-gap introduced in the 60s when this stuff was brand new, but unnecessary and no longer useful today. These are simply Artists. Full stop. They often work in installation, sometimes in film, video, photography, computational playback mechanisms (Stan Douglas)... the term "Video Art" is now simply marketing jargon.
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