art shock

I had the chance to listen to a portion of NPR’s Neal Conan interview Simon Schama about his new book, The Power of Art, and the accompanying BBC series. I have read his book Landscape and Memory and liked the way he approached the confluence of the two. Having taken RIT professor Elliott Rubenstein’s class about the book Shock of the New, I am always intrigued about how art influences society and culture.

On the BBC web site Schama is quoted as saying: 'The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our default mode of seeing. After an encounter with that force, we don't look at a face, a colour, a sky, a body, in quite the same way again. We get fitted with new sight: in-sight.'

I wonder if we have the capacity to shake people into revelation in the field of multimedia. I am seeing more and more work that gets close, and I sincerely hope that we have that capacity to get people to see the world from a different perspective. We can always dream.