Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images

By Barbara Maria Stafford

Book Overview

Building on the arguments of her previous books, Body Criticism (1991) and Artful Science (1994), Good Looking challenges the reflexive identification of images with vice. Today rampant criticism, both inside and outside the academy, condemns the immoralities of aesthetic illusion, museum display, cable television and hypermedia. Believing with the American pragmatists that it is harder to do than to denounce, Barbara Stafford urges imagists to abandon Foucault's bankrupt paradigm of verbal combat. Instead of more improving theoretical discourse, she calls for developing a positive visual praxis on the interpretive ruins of linguistic postmodernism. Not deconstructive autopsy, but demonstrating the historical virtues of visualization for the emergent era of computerism is the task at hand.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262193698
• ISBN13: 9780262193696
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 259 Pages
• Weight: 1.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.6" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

Good Looking

Review of Barbara Maria Stafford's Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images Andrea Juillerat The book is first and foremost a manifesto, a call to arms for image oriented artists and workers everywhere. She considers her manifesto to be constructivist, a blueprint for building a new kind of "education through vision." The books consists of a series of essays that bring to light and repudiate the assumption in all areas of academia that linguistic information is superior to visual information. She also spends some time unpacking the origin of this prejudice against imagery and why is occurred. Additionally she examines a few possible areas through which the reputation of imagery might be redeemed and improved. Her thinking on the whole topic is decidedly interdisciplinary, reaching often into fields of medicine and natural biology. Throughout the essays there are several threads of commonality; one of them is a comparison that she consistently draws between eighteenth century Enlightenment and the current internet explosion of the digital age. Her corollaries between the two eras are not tenuous, but perhaps rely more on emphasis than overt similarities. Interestingly she tries to show that our current postmodern condition and the popularity of the computational theory of mind are the result of Enlightenment philosophies carries to their logical and most extreme end. Stafford asserts that the subjugation of imagery began in the eighteenth century when rational philosophies hardened into systems that demoted images to a merely decorative or craft status. The tendency to favor text as the dominant agency of knowledge is evidenced in early twentieth century modernism by the creations of numerous manifestos. Apparently visual aggregates were not enough to ensure the level of response and respect that artists wanted, so they applied written manifestos to the problem and incorporated text and linguistic messages into their work. By the end of the twentieth century there is a shift toward optical information via television, video, internet, performance, advertising, and general media spectacle. Despite this time period being so visually saturated, she insists that we are still "mired in a deep logocentrism...convince of the superiority of writing." Stafford claims that the 18th century is like the late 20th century, both experienced a revolution in visual apprehension and conceptualization, both were subject to a linguistic backlash. New etching technologies and a penchant for collections lead to new ways of cataloging information, visual objects were much more complete than text descriptions and so optical information was enjoying a lively popularity in the eighteenth century. Those who could afford them kept curio boxes or entire rooms for housing artifacts and specimens of interest to the newly enlightened populace. Most importantly, both of these time periods experienced a "privatization of pleasurable beholding" which allowed individua

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.

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