[.ca] Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (ISBN 0262692104)

From Amazon.com:
In a world with an ever-increasing number of visual images bombarding our every moment, art historian Barbara Maria Stafford wants readers to face the future with a more practiced and educated visual vocabulary. In Good Looking, Stafford begins by positioning contemporary culture in historical context. She compares the current fin-de-siécle anxiety and excitement about changing modes of communication and transfer of information with that of the Enlightenment. She likens 18th-century wonder cabinets to virtual reality and traces the complications of seeing versus believing to a history of mistrust of visual media. The 12 essays that comprise the book focus on visual information's continued low status in culture even as its impact continually increases. In the hopes of beginning to change this, Stafford organized a symposium in 1993, "Imaging the Body: Art and Science in Modern Culture." She "wanted to find out if past modes of visualizing the invisible physical and mental processes had any current relevance." In other words, it might be wise to take a look at our inherited relationships to what we learn and understand through visuals because, thanks in part to the Internet, this medium is becoming even more pervasive. --Jennifer Cohen

The most important thesis in the visual arts this decade!:
"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

The Opening of the American Mind:
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.