I stumbled upon an essay by David Hockney in The Guardian that I wanted to share... It's kind of all over the place (it goes off on at least one tangent I think) and I don't know enough about medieval European history to judge whether his analysis is accurate. (Many Guardian readers disagree with him, apparently.) But I think the following is paragraph pretty great food for thought. Reading it helped me realize how happy I am to be living in era when people are making video clips of Big Dog Beta and I'm able to watch them.
The church had social control. Whoever controlled the images had power. And they still do. Social control followed the lens and mirror for most of the 20th century. What's now known as the media exert social control, not the church, but we are moving into a new era, because the making and distribution of images is changing. Anyone can make and distribute images on a mobile phone. The equipment is everywhere.
Check out the full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/27/religion.filmnews?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
