Against Immediacy is a history of early video art considered in relation to television in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It examines how artists questioned the ways in which "the people" were ideologically figured by the commercial mass media. During this time, artists and organizations including Nam June Paik, Juan Downey, and the Women's Video News Service challenged the existing limits of the one-to-many model of televisual broadcasting while simultaneously constructing more democratic, bottom-up models in which the people mediated themselves. Operating at the intersection between art history and media studies, Against Immediacy connects early video art and the rise of the media screen in gallery-based art to discussions about participation and the activation of the spectator in art and electronic media, moving from video art as an early form of democratic media practice to its canonization as a form of high art.

Against Immediacy is a history of early video art considered in relation to television in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It examines how artists questioned the ways in which "the people" were ideologically figured by the commercial mass media. During this time, artists and organizations including Nam June Paik, Juan Downey, and the Women's Video News Service challenged the existing limits of the one-to-many model of televisual broadcasting while simultaneously constructing more democratic, bottom-up models in which the people mediated themselves. Operating at the intersection between art history and media studies, Against Immediacy connects early video art and the rise of the media screen in gallery-based art to discussions about participation and the activation of the spectator in art and electronic media, moving from video art as an early form of democratic media practice to its canonization as a form of high art.

In 1940, The Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, the great American architect, then in his 70s, who had experienced a professional rebirth over the previous decade after many years of relative invisibility. Wright was a full collaborator in the organization of the project, which he intended, he said to be "the show to end all shows." To accompany the exhibition, the Museum planned a publication in the form of a "Festschrift, commissioning essays from many of the best-known architecture figures of the day--Alvar Aalto, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Richard Neutra, Mies van der Rohe, and others. Wright, however, took issue with certain parts of the book, complimentary though it was, and after an incendiary exchange of correspondence, including the architect's threat to cancel the entire exhibition, the show went forward but the book did not. In the 60-odd years since, the essays that MoMA commissioned have remained in its files, most of them lost to public view. Now, for the first time in one volume, MoMA is publishing the entire surviving group, along with a full selection of the letters and telegrams between Wright, MoMA, and others detailing MoMA's and the architect's collaboration-cum-collision. Accompanying these period documents is an extensive essay by the noted Frank Lloyd Wright scholar Kathryn Smith, who provides a full account of the exhibition, both as is was and as it was intended to be--including, for example, an unrealized plan to erect one of Wright's Usonian Houses in the MoMA garden. Smith also explores Wright's relationship to his critics, the architectural profession, and the Museum in the years leading up to the exhibition.