Modern visuality

Martin Jay, writer of "Vision and Visuality," begins his essay by posing an interesting question. He asks if the "visual culture of this era" descended from a combination of past art techniques he calls "scopic regimes" or is it actually just a cluster of styles competing against each other, leaving the viewers forced to choose sides (3)?

In an era where a cell phone, a computer and a television set can basically give you the world at your fingertips, it is easy to say that the modern day is dominated by the visual sense. Major companies all over the world constantly come up with technologies' latest innovations--whether it be Apple's new i-phone, an Hp laptop or an Plasma flat-screen--that provide the user's eyes with thousands of images and photos, and just like the saying goes, each worth a thousand words. During the Renaissance Ages, photography was still yet to be invented. However, the recent discovery at that time-linear perspective-allowed its artists to capture images and figures, just like today's photographs, and present its viewers with a more realistic portrayal of a moment in time. "Renaissance perspective and the Cartesian ideas of subjective rationality," which Jay refers to as Cartesian perspective, is widely criticized for mainly, not being a form of art at all but simply a set of mathematical rules and regulation an artist follows to create a realistic 3-D image on a 2-D canvas (4). "Northern art...suppresses narrative and textual reference in favor of description and visual surface" (12). While understandable, I disagree with this argument simply because of the fact that yes, these paintings done in the Cartesian perspective are almost exact replicas of the real world (even though most of what is being portrayed never existed but looks real just the same) just like still photos taken by a camera, but if this argument was true, then the art of photography wouldn't be considered a form of art as well. Even though the artist uses math concepts, he/she is still using artistic creativity to decide what exactly to place here or what to put there, thereby still portraying a some sort of story about whats going on in the scene.

Later on in the essay, Jay provides several insights of other critiques who are against Cartesian perspective and instead, for Dutch art or Baroque. Dutch art looks similar to renaissance art but tended to have more symbolism incorporated in the work and perhaps less structured. Also, its content for its paintings were of more realistic things, like actual landscapes, everyday objects and even people. Baroque art emphasized the elaborate, bizarre and dramatic. It rejected the ways of the Cartesian perspective and posed as almost its' complete opposite.

If you ask me, art shouldn't be all about which style is the better than the rest or where did modern art come the most from. Like Jay mentions in the end of the essay, one should learn how to appreciate the many forms of art. There's really no use in criticizing a specific technique because ultimately, all that artist was trying to do was express his/her creativity through the use of a canvas and paint. Someone somewhere around the globe is bound to appreciate that artwork for its message or its aesthetic beauty despite the methods used.