"Why This Collection?"

Moses Znaimer

Chairman and Executive Producer, MZTV Museum

From the Catalogue Watching TV: Historic Televisions and Memorabilia from the MZTV Museum.

Many answers have been given to the question "Why do people collect?" Too many for comfort suggest neuroses of various kinds. Collectors do it because they feel alienated from the real world and must create one of their own. They do it to be godlike and controlling. They do it out of pride or jealousy, or to keep objects away from others.

Ever the optimist, I prefer a more positive interpretation. Society turns into a culture when it shows an interest in preserving its past. In the personality of an individual collector such an impulse to gather, preserve, understand and pass along can be highly developed.

In my own case it also had something to do with a "love at first sight" response to the beauty of a Philco Predicta. I was in Peter Goldmark's office at the time. Goldmark, who had invented the 331/3 long playing record, was head of CBS labs. I was there to marvel at a new technology, the EVR 8mm half-frame film cartridge system, which promised to do for consumer home video what the LP had done for audio. I found, however, that I couldn't keep my eyes off an "old" television set that stood in the corner like a sentinel, like a commanding piece of sculpture. Alas, the EVR arrived at the same time as re-recordable video tape and CBS had to take one of the largest write-downs in its history. But I came away that day having seen the most beautiful television ever made; a symbol of my conviction that TV could be art, and would be my art.

Once caught in this way, I set out to acquire one, and then a few other, older pieces; but experienced surprising difficulty in finding them. It struck me why: because the very ubiquity of television had led to a kind of neglect. Because TV was widely seen as banal, its hallowed instruments had been devalued and lost. So it happened that I set about securing the most important of these totems - milestones in technology or design - these living pieces of furniture. In this, I "stand on the shoulders" of Arnold Chase and Jack Davis, among others, whose pioneering work immeasurably enriched the nascent collection I had cobbled together over the years, giving it form and distinction.

Today, a mere 70 years after its introduction, television has become the touchstone of personal, national, and world memory. There are more TVs than telephones or indoor toilets, well over a billion, or roughly one set for every four people on the planet. The paradox is that while television has had an unparalleled effect on our lives, the history of the construction of the receivers themselves has been almost totally neglected. Our museum redresses this oversight with sets charting the history of the small screen, from its inception in the1920¹s to the advent of solid-state electronics in the '70s.

The MZTV Museum's public showings - organized thus far with the Royal Ontario Museum's Institute of Contemporary Culture in Toronto, the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa/Hull, the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff and the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montréal - reflect the appreciation that television is at once an Object, and a Miracle Relationship, one that has for too long been taken for granted.

We hope that the TVs will evoke nostalgia from people of all ages. A handful may recall the first broadcast experiments of the '30s. Others will be stimulated by the veneered and bakelite sets of the late '40s, with their early memories of children's programs, or major sporting, showbiz and political events. Televisions changed from being symbols of 1950s affluence to '60s and '70s household necessities, thereby mirroring the evolution of a North American design aesthetic while also saying something about attitudes towards technology over the same period.

Several of the pieces, especially the original star of television, Felix the Cat, and the 1939 World's Fair Phantom Teleceiver, are literally unique. Other models, such as the Baird Televisor and Alexanderson's Octagon, are extremely rare.

I believe that all over the planet there is a sudden awakening to television's epic significance; and very soon, no collection of hardware or software, no collection of fashion or manners or machines will be thought complete without presentation of the boxes and screens that bring us information, entertainment and education in perpetual flow.

There are fewer prewar TVs left in the world than Stradivarius violins.

Moses Znaimer
Chairman and Executive Producer, MZTV Museum