Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images

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. These twelve essays meditate on the stunning implications of a global shift toward vision and visionary modalities. Apparatus changes, but the basic questions endure. Machine dreams flowing from laser disks, video tapes, CD-ROMs, and magnetic disks are transforming educational, medical, and legal institutions as well as on-line society at large. Organized around three major themes - the explosion of optical information, the urgency of inventing an imaging interdiscipline, and the ethical dilemmas of technological transparency - these pieces connect a disappearing lens culture to the digital diaphanousness of the twenty-first century. Art historian Barbara Maria Stafford is William B. Odgen Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and current president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. -- from back cover.