Sam Sherman

Sam Sherman in conversation with Joachim Pissarro

Sam Sherman: I’m not sure exactly how the COVID crisis is affecting my work because I’ve been working on videos that take a while to make. I feel like the past six months have provided input for me to use in future work, but it hasn’t shown up yet. The work that I have completed mostly looks back at the media environment in the US, particularly television news. My interest in it came from trying to understand how we got to this place of extreme polarization. And I actually ended up looking back at 2003 and the invasion of Iraq. I saw that era as a turning point for the development of the media—the extreme polarization of it.

Joachim Pissarro: In 2003, my youngest boy was just born and it was just a scary, scary moment. Adrian Piper was leaving permanently the United States for Berlin, where she has refused to come back to the US because of this—the invention of fake news. I don’t know if you get into this at all, but fake news is not a Trump invention. Colin Powell in front of the United Nations gave news about the Iraqis using chemical weapons, which was proven to be fake, to be false. There was a very big tapestry there with a reproduction of Guernica—Picasso’s Guernica—and the Bush administration felt that it was too aggressive and too stirring and had it removed.