Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images

Rating:
Summary: The most important thesis in the visual arts this decade!
Review: "Americans are like fish that can't see water."(Groth 1997, in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes) A further contemporary and obsolete view of the image in culture is: "We can... be beguiled by sight: The eye may be less reliable than the mind, or even the heart." (King 1997)

Barbara Stafford, in Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images, has indicated the need for a manifesto and the structure for a praxis with a positive, embryological approach in this foggy and contentious area of the visual arts.

"Today's instructional landscape must inevitably evolve or die, like biological species, since its environment is being radically altered by volatile visualization technologies. This ongoing displacement of fixed, monochromatic type by interactive, multidimensional graphics is a tumultuous process. In the realm of the artificial, as in nature, extinction occurs when there is no accommodation. Imaginative adaptation to the information superhighway, even the survival of reflective communication, means casting off vestigial biases automatically coupling printed words to introspective depth and pictures to dumbing down."

I am reminded that: "Hypertext is, before anything else, a visual form." (Joyce 1995) An image, or hypertext, response in design, or "hyperdesign" (Hotten 1998) is an indicated, yet mysteriously missing, part of the eidetic palette in design and the visual arts.

Gates and Getty are speculating on the value of the image. Both are assembling image data banks with hundreds of millions of images. In the future, who will copyright the image rights to the landscape and what will this mean to the culture versus nature discourse? Will the fish even be allowed to see the water?

Copyright Robert Hotten 1999

Rating:
Summary: The most important thesis in the visual arts this decade!
Review: "Americans are like fish that can't see water."(Groth 1997, in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes) A further contemporary and obsolete view of the image in culture is: "We can... be beguiled by sight: The eye may be less reliable than the mind, or even the heart." (King 1997)

Barbara Stafford, in Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images, has indicated the need for a manifesto and the structure for a praxis with a positive, embryological approach in this foggy and contentious area of the visual arts.

"Today's instructional landscape must inevitably evolve or die, like biological species, since its environment is being radically altered by volatile visualization technologies. This ongoing displacement of fixed, monochromatic type by interactive, multidimensional graphics is a tumultuous process. In the realm of the artificial, as in nature, extinction occurs when there is no accommodation. Imaginative adaptation to the information superhighway, even the survival of reflective communication, means casting off vestigial biases automatically coupling printed words to introspective depth and pictures to dumbing down."

I am reminded that: "Hypertext is, before anything else, a visual form." (Joyce 1995) An image, or hypertext, response in design, or "hyperdesign" (Hotten 1998) is an indicated, yet mysteriously missing, part of the eidetic palette in design and the visual arts.

Gates and Getty are speculating on the value of the image. Both are assembling image data banks with hundreds of millions of images. In the future, who will copyright the image rights to the landscape and what will this mean to the culture versus nature discourse? Will the fish even be allowed to see the water?

Copyright Robert Hotten 1999

Rating:
Summary: The Opening of the American Mind
Review: Alan Bloom ("The Closing of the American Mind") and Neil Postman ("Amusing Ourselves to Death") are challenged by Stafford's thesis. Not only are they wrong for thinking our image culture is dumber than the text culture of their youth, images have always been a more powerful way to communicate more information to more people. Stafford demonstrates this by showing how art over history has been better at communicating the difficult and complex to a broader audience than text. Text has always been the tool of a limited social class while art has educated the masses. Today with digital art through movies and the Internet web pages even more people can learn more than ever.

My own sense tends towards agreement with this thesis. When faced with students that are not interested in reading but love to watch (in the sense of Peter Sellers' "Being There") I have the clear sense that this is because compared to movies books are boring. Why? Certainly not always, and certainly not for all students, but in general, movies are too compelling a medium to be seriously challenged by a text - (not in the Postmodern sense of "the text").

Stafford's argument lends support to the idea that there is a good reason for this and not just an explanation.

My only critique is that there are no color plates and color should certainly be part of the argument.

Rating:
Summary: The Opening of the American Mind
Review: Alan Bloom ("The Closing of the American Mind") and Neil Postman ("Amusing Ourselves to Death") are challenged by Stafford's thesis. Not only are they wrong for thinking our image culture is dumber than the text culture of their youth, images have always been a more powerful way to communicate more information to more people. Stafford demonstrates this by showing how art over history has been better at communicating the difficult and complex to a broader audience than text. Text has always been the tool of a limited social class while art has educated the masses. Today with digital art through movies and the Internet web pages even more people can learn more than ever.

My own sense tends towards agreement with this thesis. When faced with students that are not interested in reading but love to watch (in the sense of Peter Sellers' "Being There") I have the clear sense that this is because compared to movies books are boring. Why? Certainly not always, and certainly not for all students, but in general, movies are too compelling a medium to be seriously challenged by a text - (not in the Postmodern sense of "the text").

Stafford's argument lends support to the idea that there is a good reason for this and not just an explanation.

My only critique is that there are no color plates and color should certainly be part of the argument.