Today, hundreds powerful new representational electronic tools has created a dramatic change in the principles for art, calling into question the way we see, the way we get knowledge, and the way we understand it. Modern artists face a dilemma incredible even at the beginning of the twentieth century when photography and cinematography created a crisis in existing traditions of representation. Electronic tools and media have crushed the very model of cognition and representation we have been operating under since the Renaissance.

Vision is one of the most powerful of the senses. Seeing is related to art through a system we call representation, a complex term which allows us to examine significant aspects of art practice. Images are not just simple imitations of the world, but are always reordered, refashioned, styled, and coded according to the different rules which develop out of each medium and its tools-sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, video, and computer amongst others. However, the way we see is shaped by our worldview, which governs our understanding of what representation is. Thus we can say that representation is a form of ideology because it has inscribed within it all the attitudes we have about our response to images and their assimilation; and about art-making in general, with all its hierarchies of meaning and intentionality.

A useful construct for examining the difference between vision and representation is provided in an interesting current book by contemporary art historian Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century. Here she compares the differences in attitudes between Dutch and Italian Renaissance artists toward representation. Italian forms of representation were based on worldview of the Renaissance with its conceptual notions of perfect beauty and posies. Artists’ selections from nature were chosen with an eye to sensitive beauty and mathematical harmony-an ordering of what was seen according to the informed choices and judgment of the artist based on particular issues and concepts rather than as a form of representation where the single most important reference is the natural appearance of things.

It reflected the views of Plato as articulated in texts such as the Republic. Plato regarded imagination and vision as inferior capacities, a product of the lowest level of consciousness. He believed that reason allows us to think of truth, while the products of vision and imagination can present only false imitations, part of the irrational world of illusion and belief inferior to philosophy and mathematics which he designated as higher forms of knowledge. He illustrated his ideas using the example of a bed, assuming that there are three kinds of beds: one the essential concept of the bed, created by God; then that of a real bed made by a carpenter trying to make ultimate reality; finally, the artist’s representation of it which stands removed from its reality.