In My Opinion: The New Visual

By John Fiske

Many gurus believe that the digital revolution we’re going through will be even more profound than the industrial. They may well be right, and the more I think about it, the more I’m struck with how visual the digital world is: in fact I think that digitalization is changing the dominant medium of our culture from the word to the image.

Coach got me thinking, too. The company has made a fortune selling expensive handbags on their visual qualities. Now I’m not saying they’re not functional, I’m sure they’re every bit as useful as a plastic bag from the grocery store, but what makes them “Coach” is their visual appeal. Coach recently responded to the soggy economy by bringing out a new line called “Poppy” that was designed to cost 20 percent less than previous lines, but to be just as visually striking. Reed Krakoff, Coach’s creative director, said, “People are not buying safe. It’s a mistake to think so. People want to be inspired …That’s what shopping is about.” (Business Week, June 29, 2009). Inspiration, not safety.

Larry Johnson, an expert in visual merchandising, advised readers of Show Time (the free newsletter published by Armacost Antiques Shows) that distinctiveness is the key. If you want to sell on price, he advises, mass similar items at similar prices together. You thus give the customer plenty of choice in which price is not a factor; she or he can choose on visual qualities alone. But if you have a singular item, inevitably more expensive, you must separate it out, and present it singularly, making it look distinctive. The consumer choice then is not “which one?” but “this or nothing?” So you present it as truly distinctive, you’ll-never-find-another, which will make the “nothing” choice unbearable and “this” the only option.
Ah, you breathe a sigh of relief, “Antiques are both inspirational and distinctive - that’s why we love ‘em!” Well, maybe to us they are… but to others? And, more to the point, maybe the way we present them is neither inspirational nor distinctive, at least not in the digital world we now live in.

The victory of the visual
Our visual culture, to take a broader perspective for a moment, did not come out of nowhere. Images are important in all cultures, and despite the fact that the Western world up until now has produced literate, not visual, cultures, images have steadily increased in importance, with the big acceleration coming in the Renaissance. But, until recently, the image never challenged the word for dominance. This was partly because producing images by hand required such a high degree of skill that very few people could do it, so there were very few images. A television viewer today will see more images in 30 minutes than an inhabitant of the eighteenth century would have seen in a lifetime. Despite the good efforts of engravers and printers to multiply the images available, images remained, by our standards, rare.

Photography began to tilt the balance of power from the verbal to the visual. It could do this because it brought two new qualities to traditional visual culture: infinite reproducibility and the de-professionalization of image production: almost anyone with a camera could produce an image that could be seen by millions of people.

And then photography exploded into today’s digital visual culture. Digitalization has finally tipped the balance of power from the verbal to the visual. What digitalization brought to the photograph was instantaneous, infinite and de-industrialized distribution. There is no limit to the reach of a digital image, and we can do it all from home. If we learn basic digital literacy, we can produce, reproduce and distribute our images using our own resources only. And the images can be received on whatever the recipient has handy: a computer, a netbook, a BlackBerry, a cell phone… They can be printed out, framed and hung on the wall or displayed in a digital “photoframe” or watched on the television.

Digitalization has also reduced the operating costs of production and distribution almost to zero: once you’ve invested the capital to buy a camera, computer and the software; once you’ve paid the overheads of internet access, a website and a cell phone account; then you can exploit the whole of the digital visual universe virtually for free. The images streaming out of Iran from cell phones are an obvious example (the cell phone, which is now at least as visual as it used to be verbal is rapidly replacing the words-only landline, yet another sign of the cultural shift to the visual).

The new digital
The digital world has broken many of the constraints of the physical. So when we are looking for distinctiveness and inspiration, we can give our imaginations free rein. Let us start with the premises that the digital experience can now stand in for a real life experience, can actually improve upon it, and, in an odd way, can multiply it. Watch someone scrolling through the images on his or her smart phone; they always seem to have multiple images of an object or event. Traditional visual media showed us one image – the best; digital shows us multiples, gives us multiple impressions of the object, multiple points of focus.

The traditional image of an antique shows us its generic identity – a pitcher, a whirligig, a chest of drawers. If it’s a good image, it will catch attention and arouse interest. By “good” I refer to its sensuous colors and textures, its highlights and shadows that accentuate its form. If it’s really good, it might arouse interest and admiration.

But it’s unlikely to reach distinctiveness and inspiration, at least for those who live and breathe in a digital environment. In Krakoff’s terms, the generic image is playing safe, which is not what people want. Safety and familiarity are not inspirational.

In the digital age a single image is not enough. Single images are from the visual culture of the pre-digital age, the age of paper, of oil on canvas. Pixels on a screen invite multiplicity. To reach digital distinctiveness, we need close-ups of details and textures, views from unexpected angles that are unlikely in real life. We cannot tell which detail, which angle, will inspire any particular viewer - it will likely be different for each. A risky, unexpected shot may inspire one viewer only, but that may be the one viewer you want. The digital world is one of menus of options, not of pre-selected choices of “the best.” An antique is always composed of many elements, each of which may be distinctive or inspirational. So think of an antique not as an object but as a menu of desires for viewers to scroll through. That’s digital thinking.

We’re not constrained by the costs of reproduction and distribution; we’re not constrained by the limits of pre-digital materials and technologies. Our only constraints are the time and attention of the viewer. People’s time is getting shorter and shorter, and so are their attention spans. So a necessary objective in the digital world is “stickiness,” the measure of how long a viewer stays browsing your images and looking at what it offers. Increasing stickiness is the only way to compete in a world swamped by digital images and awash with tempting links forever leading the viewer on to the next, the next, the next…

Every digital image tries to halt and hold the scrolling eye. It has to work as effectively on the two-inch screen of a smart phone as on the 30-inches of a flat screen monitor. It must contain the minimum of information – it can’t do a Breugel and expect the viewer to spend hours enjoying the multifarious details. It must say one thing, and say it clearly – all figure, no ground, to use art jargon. Clear out the clutter and leave the essence starkly exposed. The traditional image showed all that was necessary: the digital image shows the exceptional. It knows that it’s one of many, so it shows what the others don’t.

It works in a flash. Any one image can momentarily interrupt the constant scrolling, but only on rare, though highly desirable, occasions will it cause the eye to linger. Lingering is out of style these days. The image has a fraction of a second to grab attention, and not much longer to say what it has to. It says little, but says it loudly.

The digital image speaks for itself. Downloaded, it comes without words, without an explanatory caption. On the website, of course, it has a verbal explanation where the words can say what the image doesn’t. So it must work with words, but crucially it works without them.

Go to 1stdibs.com for an object lesson. Each object has a generic, safe shot, and then multiple detail shots. But the detail shots are disappointing; they’re no more inspirational than the generic. They’re taken by a professional photographer, not by an antique lover, so there’s nothing risky or unexpected about them. They never pick the detail that can make you shiver; they don’t show what the decorator can’t see but the connoisseur wants to. We can do better than that, because we know our antiques in intimate detail, so we can show the detail in hold-your-breath intimacy. Remember, the digital world is de-professionalized; with time, thought and passion, we can present our antiques more distinctively, more inspirationally, than any coldly-trained professional.

Enthusiastic though I am about the potential of the digital world, there’s no silver bullet there. Nothing we do today can hasten the end of the recession. All we can do is do all we can do to mitigate its dire effects, and, provided we survive it, to prepare for the world that will follow it. That’s the key. I can’t tell you how many dealers I’ve spoken to who say that this recession is very different from the others they’ve lived through. I agree with them. This recession is a game-changer: the world that comes out of it will be very different from the one that went in. And one of the many changes is that it’ll be far more digital. The virtual will be the new reality. I keep trying to figure out some, at least, of the conditions we’ll meet when times get better. None of us have the answers, but I hope you’ll join me in thinking. After all’s said and done, it’s better to have our heads in the clouds than in the sand.

Originally published in New England Antiques Journal, August 2009.