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routes: «The video tapes come with a signed and numbered certificate.»[21] This can be found in his obviously necessary «Information on the video system» (1972). At the same time, Schum used the museums that had already decided to acquire a Sony half-inch video system to help him convince the undecided institutions. At the same time, Howard Wise made his gallery the world's first video art sales point, Electronic Arts Intermix,[22] which has remained a central engine for 1970s video art classics in particular to the present day. When one recalls that it was also as early as 1972 that the first institutional video collection started at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and that in the previous year in the USA David Ross had become the first video curator at the Everson Museum of Modern Art Syracuse,[23] there is some sense of the innovative potential of those years for exploiting all the media art options, from mass sales to artistic collection.

The unresolved question was still: does the sales organization work like a book publisher, or a film producer, who aims at a potential mass market, or does it work like a gallery producing collectors' editions?[24] It is not just that the old media are continued in the

 

new ones, as stated by Marshall McLuhan, the production and reception structures are transferred to the new media as a first step.[25] Attempts to reclaim or create old and abandoned or new public locations for this art are therefore one of the continuing characteristics of media art.[26] The lesson of the last decade in particular, with its effortless integration of video into the exhibition context, lies paradoxically in the fact that video, as an infinitely reproducible medium, does not ultimately prevent a work of art from acquiring an aura as long as it can be exhibited as an installation in a museum as an individual work. But even though at a very early stage isolated, established and younger artists followed Andy Warhol and took the notion of the non-auratic medium to absurd lengths, fundamental problems dominated for a long time: 1. Fine art: the museum and the collector trusted neither the dealer's contract nor the reliability of the new video technology; 2. The film and cinema market: both classical and experimental filmmakers criticized video, which they saw as a cheap and grubby medium, for its poor picture quality in comparison with celluloid; 3. From the outset, television had an

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