He Who Controls the Images Controls the Universe
Posted by ben on 29 Mar 2008 at 10:39 am | Tagged as: essays, responses/reviews
The Guardian recently featured a piece by David Hockney in which he claims that the decline of the church is directly connected to the democratization of imagery. It’s true that religious institutions have a history of trying to control the kinds of images people create and see, and I’m sure their reasons for doing this have to do with maintaining their grip over people’s minds. But I think you could make virtually the same argument about the church’s control of music, sexuality, history, poetry, or any number of creative ventures (hmm… is history a creative venture?). And this is why Hockney gets it wrong when he says “the power is with images, not art.” The implication here is that power flows from the material truth of the camera, not from the spiritual truth of a work of art. In the past I have quoted Camus making the point that freedom is predicated on the creative act, not production, not representation. This is why churches have tried, and still try, to control creativity — and why their control of material wealth is ultimately secondary to their control of the spirit.
The need to put the men on the moon is essentially a personal humanistic approach…anthropomorphic. If they thought about the infiniteness of space like Pascal where they actually are terrified, you know can sort of be terrified and have a tragic view…The consciousness of most people is on a particular kind of level where they never really get beyond mechanism and electronics and it sort of stays on that level and they can’t really conceive of a universe in terms of their own experience. A universe based on empirical facts which I’m really not interested in.
[...] https://emvergeoning.com/?p=1163The Guardian recently featured a piece by David Hockney in which he claims that the decline of the church is directly connected to the democratization of imagery. It’s true that religious institutions have a history of trying to control … [...]
breakthrough
In earlier times, too, religion had insisted on the constant thought of death, but the pious treatises of these ages only reached those who had already turned away from the world. Since the thirteenth century, the popular preaching of the mendicant orders had made the eternal admonition to remember death swell into a sombre chorus ringing throughout the world. Towards the fifteenth century, a new means of inculcating the awful thought into all minds was added to the words of the preacher, namely the popular woodcut. Now these two means of expression, sermons and woodcuts, both addressing themselves to the multitude and limited to crude effects, could only represent death in a simple and striking form.
History does not influence me: I influence history.
Edita Gruberova