The election will be televised: 70 years of TV ads for US voters

The election will be televised: 70 years of TV ads for US voters

Political Advertisements 1952-2024 is a fascinating political video art project for which the seed was planted four decades ago. The year was 1984, when Republican Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale to win re-election and the Spanish-born, United States-based post-conceptual artist Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) began to collaborate with U.S. creative Marshall Reese (Washington D.C., 1955) on an investigation of television spots paid for by the Democratic and Republican Parties, beginning from when the first such TV ads appeared in 1952. Their birth coincided with the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower’s winning campaign, powered by his famous slogan, “I Like Ike.” Eisenhower occupied the White House for eight years, a period characterized by McCarthyism, which brought with it political witch hunts and anti-communist obsession. The birth of televised electioneering in 1952 was only to evolve every four years, its most recent form taking shape during Kamala Harris’s current electoral battle against Donald Trump.

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