Crystal and Smoke - Putting Image Back in Mind

On Jan. 28 2008 at 5:30 pm, I'll be listening to a lecture by Barbara Maria Stafford, the first of a series of six. Tomorrow night's offering is entitled "Skeletal Figures: The Emotional Intuition of Form."

Dr. Stafford's work, from what I understand, uses neurosciences as a point of embarkation for her exploration of "perception, sensation, emotion, mental imagery, and subjectivity" in art, from the early modern to the contemporary era.

It has been several years since I sat in a formal art history course. I'm looking forward to the experience.

Edit: Here is an excerpt from her book Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images,

"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."

Professor Stafford's delivery was precisely as one might expect from reading the above paragraph. Last night's lecture, however, was concerned with structure in the visual arts as a form of human communication that transcends language. I'm not sure, but I think she made some good points.