“Spectacle: The Music Video” exhibit at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) points out that music videos have been around as long as cinematography itself. While that may be true, as a Gen Xer, I believe that MTV is the cornerstone of the modern music video, and that I’m one of its many cultural custodians. In the age of Fuse TV and YouTube, I can recite the old-school history of the music video with as much cranky condescension as any nursing-home resident.

The CAC show recognizing the music video as a legitimate form of artistic, political and cultural expression is hardly the first time a medium once thought to liquefy the brains of teenagers was eventually given the highbrow treatment. But, as with cancer and car accidents, it’s still surreal when it happens to one of your loved ones (in this case, music videos).

Thankfully, the “Spectacle” exhibit encompasses much more than MTV, which hasn’t really played music videos for roughly the last 15 years.

What to expect

You wouldn’t expect “Spectacle,” which occupies the fourth and fifth floors of the CAC until September, to have the typical museum layout. As it turns out, it both does and doesn’t. Hanging on the walls, instead of paintings, are hi-definition screens with headphones situated on neighboring pegs, accompanied by a plaque that helpfully explains the video’s context and significance for viewers who aren’t already in the know.

It does make for a certain visual monotony, but thankfully there are a few displays that break it up. (An additional nice touch would be to dress up a couple of the docents as Beavis and Butt-head to trail you around, providing information and occasional commentary, but you can’t have everything.) Once you step outside of an elevator the size of a hangar bay onto the fourth floor and turn left, you will find a life-sized cutout of A-ha’s Morten Harket, with the surrounding walls inscribed with the Tetris blocks he caromed off of in the group’s “Take On Me” video. Walking through this exhibit, with its accompanying still photographs from the video, was a sheer delight, and I’m not even female.

There’s also dark enclosures where videos are projected onto a wall, giving these portions of the exhibit a clubby feel. These niches are segregated by theme. One devoted to the use of shadow had some puzzling selections, such as Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People.” Others were much more edifying, such as the uncut, 11-minute version of Metallica’s “Unforgiven.”

On the east side of the fourth floor, just beyond Morten, is the obligatory section providing the history of the music video, starting with the musical shorts produced at the advent of the “talkie” era of motion pictures, moving up through The Beatles films, oddities such as the Scopitone, and the experiments of David Bowie.

Indeed, due to the convergence between MTV’s ascension and popular music trends at the time, it’s surprising not to see any displays devoted to hair metal.

Hip-hop is also underrepresented. There should be a monument somewhere for Schooly D’s “No More Rock and Roll,” a song and video carrying a prescience that would never have been credited at the time.

Since controversy is such a significant part of the modern music video’s history, “Spectacle” has a section with an “adult content” warning at the entrance not dissimilar to the curtained-off back rooms that video stores used to have. In keeping with the theme, there’s a large cylinder in the center of the first room lined with midsection-level peepholes, forcing the taller among us to bend down to look, as if the peepholes themselves weren’t suggestive enough.

Each peephole offers glimpses of different provocateurs. Unsurprisingly, you can glimpse Madonna through two of these, for “Like a Prayer” and “Justify My Love.”

Internet age

After you pass through the adult section, you enter a display devoted to the music video in the Internet Age. There are nods to crowd-sourced videos and all the interesting people who decided to take on Beyonce’s “All the Single Ladies.” Yet the best part of the consumer-generated section is devoted to humor, particularly the movement known as literal music videos.

The posting of literal music videos, which began on YouTube in 2008, gave voice to a long-suppressed minority, the couch satirist. These videos are overdubbed with lyrics that describe the visuals of the video, often mocking its aesthetic or the performers themselves for being illogical, formulaic or pretentious. Victims have included Pat Benatar, Avril Lavigne, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and, funnily enough given its prominence elsewhere in this exhibit, A-ha. (“Take On Me” was the first literal video.)

Yet of all the interactive exhibits, indeed of all the exhibits, the most haunting and moving is the one devoted to the late Johnny Cash. The elongated wall and alcove devoted to the Johnny Cash Project commemorates the Web site where fans around the world are invited to submit computer-generated images of Cash (the template is created for you), to be integrated into a collective, frame-by-frame sequence for the song “Ain’t No Grave,” Cash’s final studio recording.