The new building into which Robert Batscha, president of the Museum of Television and Radio, is moving his collection may crumble with time, but he is confident that what it houses will be around for the next 1,000 years.
Radio is a scant 70 years old and television is barely 50, yet the two media have produced millions of audio and video artifacts.
Batscha, whose museum has collected more than 40,000 of the best of them, said they will teach future generations more about us than we ever have been able to learn about our ancestors.
”Five hundred years ago, Columbus discovered the New World. Wouldn`t it have been wonderful if television had been there?” he said. ”Wouldn`t it be wonderful if we had on tape Columbus saying to his sailors, `We`ve found India`?
”Well, 500 years from now, people will see man landing on the moon because television did go there.”
Television has gone just about everywhere, from the truthful fantasy of the prime-time sitcom to the fantastic truth of news coverage of
assassinations, Super Bowls, space shots, a war fought right in the American living room and, most recently, the unsuccessful coup d`etat in the Soviet Union.
Like great art and the natural sciences, Batscha said, the broadcast collection draws equal numbers of students-mostly young broadcast journalists and aspiring advertising agents-and laymen. But he believes the new building, set to open Sept. 12, will make it a major tourist attraction.
William S. Paley, late founder of CBS, started the museum in 1976 with a $50 million grant. He spent $12 million more to buy the land for the new 17-story tower, designed by architect Philip Johnson and constructed of white dolomite, which has the sheen of marble and the mass of granite.
Batscha said it is ”the first museum to open in New York with its own architectural statement since the Guggenheim and the Whitney (art museums) 20 or 30 years ago. The physical identification of the buildings catapulted those two institutions. I think the physical identification of a Philip Johnson building on 52nd Street is going to catapult public awareness of this institution.”
The new building will quadruple the museum`s floor space, making it possible to accommodate as many as 2,000 visitors a day, far more than could be jammed into the tiny building where the museum was born.
The new facility includes 200-seat and 96-seat theaters, equipped for two-way satellite seminar interaction; two 50-seat TV screening rooms; and a listening room for radio. Individual screening facilities, with programs ranging from the earliest days to the present Nielsen Top 10, are available for solo or family viewing.
The collection graphically holds all the great moments and tragedies of recent history captured by the TV news camera, but Batscha said the prime-time sitcoms and commercials may give a more graphic view of America. ”When you look at this programming, you`ll see what the family looked like,” he said.
”What did the Huxtables (of `The Cosby Show`) worry about and how is that different from what the `Father Knows Best` family worried about? The contrast of those two programs tells us an enormous amount about the difference between the `50s and the `80s.
”As for advertising, if anything has shown America over the past 70 years, it`s been the automobile commercial.”
New York, of course, is not the only city to boast a museum of broadcasting. London has its Museum of the Moving Image, which concentrates on broadcast technology, and Chicago`s Museum of Broadcast Communications was founded in 1987 by Bruce DuMont, its current president.
The Chicago facility, at 800 S. Wells St., has 4,500 radio and TV titles, as well as commercials and an extensive collection of soap operas, which DuMont said constitute an art form essentially born and nurtured in Chicago.
”We`re national in scope, but Midwest in focus,” DuMont said. ”Our tribal mission focuses on Midwest-related material produced by Midwestern broadcasters.”
Some of that material rocked the world.
”If there is a core program around which the museum is built, it is the Kennedy-Nixon debate of September 1960,” DuMont said. ”That was the broadcast that married television and politics forever, and it happened in Chicago.”
