«OH, ART IS TOO HARD»

Knowing how to "read" images is a crucial skill in this media age, but the style of cultural analysis currently prevalent in universities is, in my view, counterproductive in its anti-media bias and intrusive social agenda. It teaches students suspicion and paranoia and, with its abstract European terminology, does not offer an authentic anthropology of the North American media environment in which they came to consciousness. Post-structuralism and postmodernism do not understand magic or mystique, which are intrinsic to art and imagination. It is no coincidence that since postmodernist terminology seeped into the art world in the 1980s, the fine arts have receded as a major cultural force. Creative energy is flowing instead into animation, video games, and cyber-tech, where the young are pioneers. Character-driven feature films, on the other hand, have steadily fallen in quality since the early nineties, partly because of Hollywood's increasing use of computer graphics imaging (CGI) and special effects, advanced technology that threatens to displace the live performing arts.Computer enhancement has spread to still photography in advertisements, fashion pictorials, and magazine covers, where the human figure and face are subtly elongated or remodeled at will. Caricature is our ruling mode. In the last decade in the us, there has also been a relentless speeding up of editing techniques, using flashing, even blinding, strobe-like effects that make it impossible for the eye to linger over any image or even to fully absorb it. There has been a reduction of spatial depth in image-making: one can no longer "read" distance in digitally enhanced or holographic films, where detail has a uniform, lapidary quality rather than the misty atmospherics of receding planes, so familiar to us from post-Renaissance art based on observation of nature. Movies have followed the TV model in neglecting background, the sophisticated craft of mise-en-scène. Distorting lenses and camera angles producing warped, tunnel-like effects (as in Mannerism or Expressionism) deny the premise of habitable human space. Subtlety and variety in color tones have been lost: historical stories are routinely steeped in all-purpose sepia, while serious dramas and science-fiction films are often given a flat, muted, shadowless light, as if mankind has fled underground.

Camille Paglia
The Magic of Images