Technology and the Eye
Every new imaging technology has changed not just how we make images but how we see. The camera obscura, photography, cinema, the screen. We are in the middle of another such change now.
David Hockney's argument, laid out in Secret Knowledge, is that many of the Old Masters used optical devices, camera obscuras, curved mirrors, lenses, to achieve the uncanny accuracy of their painted surfaces. The argument is contested, but the underlying point stands: artists have always used the best available technology to extend what the eye can do.
The camera obscura projected the outside world onto a surface inside a darkened room. Artists could trace the projected image, capturing perspective and proportion with a precision that freehand drawing rarely achieved. Whether Vermeer used one is debated; that the device was widely known and used is not.
Photography did not kill painting, as many feared it would. It liberated painting from the obligation to record. Once a camera could capture a likeness in seconds, painters were free to ask what painting could do that photography could not, and the answers they found, from Impressionism through abstraction to conceptual art, transformed the medium.
The screen is our current optical technology, and its effects on how we see are still being worked out. We look at more images than any previous generation, hundreds, perhaps thousands, per day. We look at them quickly, on small surfaces, in motion. We have become extraordinarily fluent at reading images and extraordinarily impatient with them.
What this means for art is not yet clear. But standing in front of a large painting, a Rothko, a Turner, a Velázquez, and giving it the time it asks for feels increasingly like a deliberate act, a choice to use the eye differently. That choice, and what it produces, is where the interesting work is happening.