Nam June Paik

A great artist and human being departed .... makes me sad; Nam Jun Paik was a great inspiration to me.

I agree. I wonderful and creative man has passed on into the next stage. I love his work and will miss hearing about what project comes next.

That's sad. I discovered his experiments with video art few years ago. :(

Quite sad, his work opened a lot of doors for me.

It is Perhaps little known how influential and inspiring Nam June Paik's work has been since
the early seventees in places far from New York and Dusseldorf. In Tel-Aviv in 1973, bits and pieces of Nam June Paik's and John Cage's work became available through the Cultural Center adjacent to the American Consulate in Tel-Aviv. This took place almost in real time, and the machines that made it possible were the color video VCR's at the Center. Paik's work, any part of it, when one was exposed to it, had the quality of transmitting meaning and energy in an almost ethereal way. What makes a great artist great?

Hopefully, the half-wits running anything that can be 'run' in this country will, eventually, clear some time off their busy and destructive schedules to consider a proper national tribute to one of America's great artists, a true lover of peace and harmony, a true priest of progress, the man who taught us that technology can make us better dancers, and more attentive listeners.

Arnon Ben-David, New York

p.s I truly hope that Paik's work will indeed be 'commercialized' in the sense of
finding its way to our department-store DVD shelves (especially his early video
pieces), and will not be buried for posterity in the dusty halls of museums. What will
probably happen, if it had not already, is, that these precious pieces, will be issued
in small video editions, for as little as 100k a piece. It is unfortunate, because these
pieces were made for television (whether as part of installations or not) and have been
poorly exposed to the public in the past thirty odd years, since at the time that they were
made, few museums were equipped for showing them properly, and later on in the eightees
despite the growing interest in Paik by the young artists of those times, the video pieces seemed to emerge mostly in the context of celebrations of early video art, Fluxus, and Cage. It is time these wonderful and inspirational works become available to a wider audience for a reasonable price, especially since their natural 'arena' is the public space - the airwayves, so to speak, and not necessarily the upscale collector's living room, or the museum.