Nam June Paik

[Dave S]

Pioneering "Video Artist" Nam June Paik died the other day. Paik was reviled by some in the collecting community as the original "fishtank guy", but I never saw him that way. In fact, he was really my first exposure to televisions as something more than "furniture". Whether you love him or hate him, he was an interesting character!

From the Associated Press:

"Nam June Paik, 74, who added video screens and images to art"

MIAMI — Nam June Paik, the avant-garde artist credited with inventing video art in the 1960s by combining multiple TV screens with sculpture, music and live performers, died Sunday night, according to his Web site. He was 74.

Mr. Paik, a South Korean native who also coined the term "electronic super highway" years before the information superhighway was invented, died of natural causes at his Miami apartment, the Web site said.

Song Tae-ho, head of a South Korean cultural foundation working on a project to build a museum for the artist, said he learned of Mr. Paik's death from the artist's nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, in New York.

Mr. Paik's work gained international praise from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago, among others, and much of it is on display at the Nam June Paik Museum in Kyonggi, South Korea. "He really led the development of a new art form, bringing the moving image into the modem art world," said John Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts at the Guggenheim.

Hanhardt called Mr. Paik a true friend and a prophet. "He foresaw that video would be an artist's medium, that it would be in museums," he said. "It's a heroic achievement."

In a 1974 report commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, Mr. Paik wrote of a telecommunications network of the future he called the "electronic super highway," predicting it "will become our springboard for new and surprising human endeavors." Two decades later, when "information superhighway" had become the phrase of the moment, he commented, "Bill Clinton stole my idea." He also was often credited with coining the phrase, "The future is now."
Trained in music, aesthetics and philosophy, he was a member of the 1960s art movement Fluxus, which was in part inspired by composer John Cage's use of everyday sounds in his music. Another Fluxus adherent was the young Yoko Ono.