The Art of Price is Right


July 28, 2001


BOB GARFIELD: Now kids may scream to get on Total Request Live, but once in a simpler time, their grandparents lined up to guess the price of a Maytag washer! In fact, people still do. The Price is Right is the quintessential game show and one of the longest lived now in its 26th season with Bob Barker on CBS. The program has so seeped into the collective unconscious it's inspired an art exhibit in Washington, DC -- but we'll get to that in a minute. Long before Bob Barker, the Price is Right had a brief run on ABC and NBC as Peter Breslow knows too well. In 1967, as other teens were grooving to the Summer of Love, he sat in the studio audience of The Newlywed Game. He won [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] an Allan Sherman record on another game show that summer--
PETER BRESLOW: But my game show way of knowledge actually began years earlier, as a little kid attending a taping of the original The Price is Right with host Bill Cullen. It was then that I had my first inkling into television's ability to fool us. I had watched the show when I was home sick from school, but this time I was sitting in the studio audience. Everything on the set was brighter and smaller than I imagined. But the epiphany came before the theme music started when Bill first walked on stage. He had a serious limp, a legacy of polio. But then, just before the red light on top of the camera flashed on, he perched himself on the side of his game show host desk and folks in television land had no idea he was disabled. Bill Cullen, Bob Eubanks, Art Fleming, Gene Rayburn, Gary Moore -- all game show gods --but really who's the most powerful lord in the pantheon of hosts? Bob Barker, that's who. [AUDIENCE CHEERING AND APPLAUDING]
BOB BARKER: I thank you for that wonderful welcome. Let us see the first item up for bids today please!
ANNOUNCER: It's an enchanting adventure playhouse! [AUDIENCE CHEERS]
PETER BRESLOW: The Price is Right was just set up to be-- an approachable Game Show. It's easily understandable and people can relate to the concepts behind it, you know, without conceptualizing about the whole thing. [LAUGHS]
PETER BRESLOW: Bob Barker is the leitmotif of artist David Jung's show at the Newmark Gallery in Washington this month. All around are paintings with obscured images of Bob and contestants rejoicing over winning items such as a 1972 Vega. You remember that compact Chevy with the aluminum engine that tended to melt? The art works all look like stylized television screens with painted horizontal lines of bad reception. But at the heart of the exhibit are real TVs -- 6 teeny tiny 4-inch ones -- all broadcasting the same black and white noirish image: Bob Barker, the tall, a little smarmy television version of a carnival barker, transformed into a chiseled-jawed romantic leading man -- all set to a homemade soundtrack. [EXCEPT OF HOMEMADE SOUND TRACK] Each TV is actually screening 900 stills, taken shot by shot that when played look like a single flickering image. Again, obscured by lines of static. It's a shadowy closeup of Bob Barker and an overjoyed winning contestant puckering up for a big smooch. But really, with all the romantic heat being generated, it could be a smoldering scene between Bogart and Bacall in Key Largo.
DAVID JUNG: This is by far I think the most powerful image out of the whole group -- the gaze within them is, is so anti-game show - it, it's probably the, the image - as an image it's probably the epitome of what I've been looking for within these images, focusing more on the romantic narratives within them and then their, their connection to romantic cinema and then '40s and '50s cinema. [HOMEMADE SOUNDTRACK UP AND UNDER]
PETER BRESLOW: And that soundtrack -- all noises created in the artist's mouth -- humming and whistling and fake static sounds that are electronically manipulated. David Jung says the mumbling is the man in the image, and the whistling is the woman, and they're trying to have a conversation. As he points out, this is all very deep.
DAVID JUNG: If you throw that into the-- to the formula of-- Hegel's dialectical theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the conversation which should be the thesis and the antithesis working against each other -- the idea of the synthesis is that it should bring the two together, and the static noise is actually -is not allowing the conversation to continue.
PETER BRESLOW: So Jung, who started out poking fun at America's excessive consumerism, has ended up with some serious art, and just maybe the apotheosis of our most enuring game show host.
DAVID JUNG: As a spinoff of this, I've, I've actually had this - have an idea of portraying Bob Barker as a figure from Persian mythology -- Perry at the Gates of Paradise, trying to bring gifts to God in order to get into heaven. [LAUGHS]
PETER BRESLOW: Whether or not God will have to guess their actual retail price remains to be seen. For On the Media, this is Peter Preslow in Washington.
PETER BRESLOW: I have just-- one more question for you.
DAVID JUNG: [Okay.]
PETER BRESLOW: Can you tell me the manufacturer's suggested price for an Amana freezer?
DAVID JUNG: An Amana freezer-- 659 dollars.
PETER BRESLOW: Have you considered going on The Price is Right? [LAUGHTER] [HOMEMADE SOUND TRACK CONTINUES, THEN OUT]