Word: shows
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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webRIOT (weekdays, 5 p.m. E.T./P.T.) is, frankly, a fairly unremarkable quiz show: four contestants watch videos and answer rapid-fire questions from the relentlessly mugging Ahmet Zappa, on a set that's a cross between Sprockets and a Sega video game. What is interesting about it is its viewers. In each of its daily airings (one for each coast), as many as 25,000 of them will compete simultaneously, online, to post the fastest correct answers in order to win prizes like MP3 players and plaster their names on TV on the high scorers' list...
...course, the immediate goal of this experiment is an old one: get kids to watch MTV. Though only a percentage of the hoped-for viewership will play at once, the show will help MTV stay on top of trends like Internet use, which is essential to keeping the music channel relevant to kids. The format rewards loyalty; in a sweepstakes at the end of the season, webRIOT will give away a Ford Focus to one lucky online player. The more games you play, the better your chances...
...game-show fan who has bitterly counted the prizes he or she should have won instead of those idiot contestants!, the chance to compete directly is alluring. On the other hand, there is a second-class element to webRIOT online: the TV contestants win bigger daily prizes (all-expense-paid vacations, for instance) and watching a show just because your name might appear on the air is a tad close to Romper Room. But, says MTV Online vice president Rick Holzman, viewers downloaded more than 750,000 copies of the game software before the show's premiere, and while...
Among critics and curators, the Rockwell show is now an occasion to announce themselves as Rockwell converts or as closet fans all along. Anytime the higher echelons of the culture industry set out to show how they're in touch with ordinary folks, they risk sounding like George Will when he writes about baseball. But this exhibit is an indicator of a real impulse in the art world lately to find vitality wherever it's to be found, now that the energies that moved modernism have long ago run aground. Perhaps for the first time in history, it's truly...
...answer, of course, is, How can you not take him seriously? Even when you see every one of his 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post spread out across one gallery of the show--and notice that more than a few of them really are a little precious--you have to admit to Rockwell's ingenuity. What the original canvases for those covers make plain is that he was a painter of great if anachronistic gifts. He carried into the 20th century the ancient pleasures of visual storytelling and fine-grained description. These happen to be the same enjoyments that...